Sheena Thomas

Arya Varma is an educator, an artist, and a founder whose work sits at the intersection of education, gender equity, and youth development. She believes that humans were put on this earth to learn how to love, and that art belongs to everyone, not only those who are told they are talented, convictions that quietly shape everything she does. She did not plan to end up in social work; the Fellowship found her, and through it she found the work that feels most like her own: being present with young people, especially girls, in a world that has not always made space for them.

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That belief turned into action as a Teaching Fellow at SPARC Public School, a low-income school in Govindrajnagar, Bengaluru, where she taught English and Social Studies to Students in Grades 6 to 9 while building a classroom culture rooted in empathy, belonging, and student voice. The Fellowship also surfaced something harder to measure: careless, unaware language from boys and a quiet helplessness in girls, safety gaps so normalised that they were rarely spoken about. Arya chose to act, initiating student-led surveys of the school and surrounding community whose findings were stark: most girls and women did not feel safe in public, especially alone or at night.

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Sahasi Kadam grew from that research. Launched in Year 2 of the Fellowship as their Be The Change Project (BTCP), the pilot ran with Students from their own school, partnering with the Bembala Foundation and Red Brigade Foundation for the self-defence component while Arya delivered the consent curriculum herself. One moment captured why it matters: a girl who had seemed quietly withdrawn through much of the programme began, toward the end, to speak up and hold herself differently, telling Arya she felt more confident now. It was not a statistic or a survey result, just a girl who felt a little more like herself, and that, for Arya, is what the work is building toward.

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The Fellowship was essential preparation for exactly this; it gave her proximity rather than distance, taught her to sit with discomfort rather than rush to fix things, to let young people lead their own inquiry, and to be rigorous about both the problem and the solution. Looking ahead, her vision is to make safety, dignity, and respect foundational to every school experience, changing the conditions boys grow up in and not only the skills girls carry. The horizon she is working toward is a city where girls grow up knowing they belong in every public space.