An alumni of the prestigious National Institute of Design (NID) and founder of Riverside School in Ahmedabad, Kiran Bir Sethi launched the ‘Design of Change’ movement in 2009 aimed at making children the future change makers of the world. 

Design for Change goes beyond teaching and encourages students to solve everyday problems they encounter as individuals, as a family or as part of a larger community. It works on a simple formula where children are asked to feel about an issue plaguing them or their surroundings, imagine a solution to that problem, act in a way to bring about a change and share the story of change with the world. In this way, every idea or solution that the child brings to life, not only breaks down barriers of conventional education, but also proves that age is no bar for ushering in change.

“ I did not set out to be a changemaker. It started when I became a mother. I saw an education system which rewarded mere compliance. We brought in the ‘I can’ mindset. focusing on feeling, imaging, doing and caring. Today, children globally are following this mindset,” said Kiran Bir Sethi after receiving businessline’s Changemaker Award for 2024 in the Change for Social Transformation category. Sethi was accompanied at the award function by her husband Geet Sethi -- a billiards world champion who dominated the cue sport in the 1990s.

Largest movement

The Design for Change is the largest movement of change by and for children. It is spearheaded by a global network of passionate community leaders, social entrepreneurs, designers and educators who nurture children.

Today, Kiran Sethi heads this global movement, where DFC provides training and tool kits free to their global partners so that they can contextualise and translate it and ‘We are in the 16th year now,” she says.

By 2024, DFC’s impact had soared to remarkable heights, receiving over 40,000 stories of change and engaging more than 2 million children across 73 countries in actively addressing societal challenges. This multi-award-winning system has also transformed educators worldwide, with close to 1.12 lakh teachers actively participating in this movement.

Going forward, Kiran Sethi is looking to go deeper into India with her model of education by connecting with State government- run schools. Her pilot programme involving 100 Gujarat government schools has seen attendance and participation in these schools rising. The interventions are small and not resource-heavy, involving modern-day gadgets used for learning in schools. She is now looking to extend the effort to 1,000 schools in Gujarat and connect with other States.

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