The Team
We are a small team of educators, artists, thought builders and change enthusiasts, driven to address challenges and opportunities concerning education in regions impacted by conflict. Our faith in disruptive design brings us together. Our learning journeys keep us rooted. And the communities we work with keep us persistent.
Lopa Shah
Founder & Director
A Social Entrepreneur, Acumen India Fellow, Designer, and Educator, Lopa is driven to design strategic educational experiences for learning institutes across a range of socio-economic communities in India. Until November 2021, she served as the Principal and Director of Design, Research and Development at Dolphin International School, Pulwama, Kashmir. She has built her skills over 10 years of experience in initiating social change through design thinking and applied theatre arts, in collaboration with private and community schools, non-governmental organisations, media collectives and socio-educational organisations like Teach For India. She has founded and runs Native, a research initiative, working on identifying learning opportunities within livelihood practices.
Lopa ‘works with and not for’ the learners, and believes in learning beyond boundaries. She weaves disciplines together and support all things educational. She studied at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.
Avni Sethi
Co-founder & Advisory
Avni Sethi is an interdisciplinary practitioner with her primary concerns lying between cultures of violence, memory, space and the body. She conceptualised and designed, the Conflictorium, a Museum of Conflict (www.conflictorium.org) in Ahmedabad and Raipur city and Mehnat Manzil (www.mehnatmanzil.org), a Museum of work situated in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in 2013, 2022 and 2019 respectively.
She has been writing and speaking about the potential of small museums as a holding space for social justice processes and the necessity of building care based ecosystems.
Trained in multiple dance idioms, her performances are largely inspired by syncretic faith traditions and sites of contested narratives. She has been continually interested in exploring the relationship between intimate audiences and the performing body. She is currently nurturing ‘Ordo Performance Collaboratory’ (www.ordocollaboratory.com), a studio space that focuses on performance based experimentations.
She is the recipient of the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice 2020-2022 by the Vera List Centre for Art and Politics. She currently lives and works in Ahmedabad, India.
Farooq Fazli
Founding Director,
Teach to ELICIT, Kashmir
Mohammad Farooq Fazli is a social entrepreneur and a veteran educationist, running a group of institutions, including B.Ed and Law Colleges along with primary and secondary schools in Pulwama, Kashmir. In his 25 years of experience, his mission has been focussed towards extending learning opportunities to children and youth of Pulwama by creating platforms for creative education and cross-cultural exchange. Mr. Fazli was felicitated with National Award for Education Transformation by Private School and Children welfare Association, and the Innovation-in-process fellowship award by Council for Global Education, along with many other prestigious awards in the realm of education. His long standing experience in transformative education for conflict informs his current work as a policy maker for schools and educational institutions in Kashmir. He leads Teach to ELICIT's Kashmir chapter with a view to extend his expertise to other schools in the valley through programmes that uphold and facilitate the values of persistence and transformation for the youth.
Bansari Rabadiya
Executive Manager
Bansari is an educator and a researcher who adapts ways to make life sustainable. After working as an educator for 4 years with students from various communities and abilities, she has enhanced her understanding of what holistic education could mean. She believes that small shifts in behaviour or action in students can make significant changes in the future. Bansari's career aspiration is to contribute to policy making in education sector to empower systems to cater to contextual challenges.
