Ananya Rawat

Ananya’s journey started in a Delhi classroom during her Teach For India Fellowship. That time shaped not just how she teaches, but how she thinks about change: that it moves through community, not despite it. The Students she taught back then are now in college, and watching them grow into their own lives still gives her a sense of hope she carries into everything she does.

​

​

That sense of possibility found new shape when Ananya and Ruchi Agarwal started Aawaz together in Kolkata, taking on two subjects most people avoid in schools: how to help children understand and talk about their emotions, and how to keep them safe from harm. Building the work together gave the two of them the courage to put themselves out there and to turn ideas that had lived only in thought into practice.

​

​

Everything the Community of Practice taught Ananya about turning ideas into action is now going into The BloomCircle Foundation, a space being built specifically for adolescent girls, centred on voice, agency, and safety. She has tried doing things alone before. But every time something truly moved, she says, it was because a community showed up around it. As she puts it, it feels as though this has only just begun.