Building Changemakers: OpenDoors x Pratham Education Foundation
At OpenDoors, we believe art is most powerful when it meets the real world, when it moves beyond the classroom wall and into the street, the neighbourhood, the community a child actually lives in. Our collaboration with Pratham Education Foundation's Creativity Club has been one of the most vivid expressions of that belief.
Working with children from small towns across Uttar Pradesh, the OpenDoors Art Program conducted a series of workshops that brought together design thinking, art-making, and a deep engagement with the built environment. Using sketching, mood boards, collages, paintings, and 3D model-making, children were guided to look at their surroundings not as a fixed backdrop, but as something designed and therefore something that could be redesigned. They identified local challenges in public spaces, explored ideas around safety, accessibility, and community well-being, and developed their own creative, empathetic solutions. Many children, for the first time, saw themselves as people with the agency to imagine a better neighbourhood.
One of the most memorable sessions took the children to Bara Imambara in Lucknow, one of the most extraordinary public buildings in India. The visit became a masterclass in how architecture speaks. Children studied its visual elements: the symmetry, the motifs, the way the building is oriented, half facing east, half facing west, and tried to understand what lay behind those choices. They looked at the steps and staircases, noticing how they were designed to be manageable, how functionality and beauty were never at odds. The religious, cultural, and civic layers of the building opened up rich conversations about what public spaces are really for. Back in the workshop, children were asked: if you could design a public building for your own village or community, what would it be? The answers were telling, a playground, a public hospital, spaces their communities genuinely needed, and the thinking that followed, about how such spaces should be planned and built, was far beyond what any textbook exercise could have drawn out of them.
These workshops do something quietly profound. They connect children to their environments in a way that feels personal and urgent. They move beyond art into design, and beyond design into problem-solving, always with empathy at the centre. This is exactly the kind of learning OpenDoors exists to create: integrated, reflective, and rooted in the lives children actually lead.
We intend to continue and scale these workshops with Pratham's Creativity Club, deepening this work season by season. Which is why it was especially meaningful when, last month, OpenDoors co-founder Neera was invited to a special two-day gathering hosted by Pratham in Pune, bringing together educators, artists, youth leaders, and practitioners committed to keeping creativity central to learning. The conversations, the exchange, and a particularly inspiring visit to the Zapurza Museum, where Paul Abraham of Sarmaya Arts Foundation spoke about preserving indigenous art practices and carrying them into contemporary learning spaces reaffirmed everything this collaboration stands for. That creative learning is not extra-curricular. That it is collective work. And that the ecosystem being built, one workshop, one conversation, one child at a time, is worth every effort.
Grateful to the Pratham team for the trust, the space, and the shared conviction that children deserve to grow up knowing they can shape the world around them.
