Sheena Thomas

Sheena Thomas is an educator, social-impact leader, and founder whose work sits at the intersection of education, gender equity, and youth development. Before the Fellowship, she completed her Electronics Engineering, built experience in marketing and institutional sales, and prepared for the Civil Services Examination, a combination that sharpened her understanding of systems, public accountability, and leadership under pressure. These experiences did not simply precede her work in education; they shaped how she approaches it, anchored in one consistent belief: that every child deserves access to a safe, equitable, and empowering learning environment.

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Her Teach For India Fellowship turned that belief into action. As a Teaching Fellow at Sparc Public School in Bengaluru, she taught Mathematics and Science to middle and secondary Students while building a classroom culture rooted in empathy, belonging, and student voice. As a Grade 9 class teacher, she saw her Students’ baseline scores improve by an average of 30%, and her classroom was nominated as a Transformational Impact Journey classroom in the city. But the Fellowship also surfaced something harder to measure: safety gaps so normalised in the community that they were rarely spoken about.

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Sheena chose to act on what she saw. Through empathy interviews and student-led research, she and Arya Varma uncovered the safety concerns many girls navigated every day, while finding that boys had few opportunities to engage in conversations around consent, boundaries, and respect. The result is a three-layer curriculum model, self-defence training for girls, consent and boundary education for boys, and community action, built to hold both empowerment and prevention at once. One moment captured why it matters: during the final demonstration, a Student who had barely spoken in the first session stepped forward and executed her techniques with such conviction that she dislodged the protective headgear of the facilitator she was paired with. The room erupted, but what stayed with Sheena was the journey from silence to self-advocacy.

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Building the organisation has meant navigating the full complexity of founding work: listening deeply, managing partnerships, and designing solutions responsive to young people’s lived experiences. The Fellowship was essential preparation for exactly this; it taught Sheena to begin with the realities Students face, to use data alongside stories, and to identify root causes rather than symptoms. Post-Fellowship, she has joined Teach For India’s Staff as a Program Manager in Hyderabad, choosing to understand the system at scale and build the institutional knowledge needed to launch Sahasi Kadam with the depth and reach it deserves. Her vision is to make safety, dignity, and respect foundational to every school experience.