Area: Youth, Student & Community Mental Health
Stage: In Progress (2025)
Initiated by: Reform for India’s Mental Health Advocacy

Project Aakaar is a pioneering school-based mental health intervention that positions emotional identity as a core developmental milestone. Designed for adolescents in government and under-resourced schools, Aakaar confronts a chronic oversight in Indian education: the near-total absence of structured space for emotional self-understanding in formative years. In a landscape where most mental health efforts arrive reactively after distress has escalated, Aakaar shifts the lens. It invests upstream, at the level of emotional cognition, self-concept, and identity formation, treating them as foundations for long-term psychological wellbeing and social agency. The project operates at the intersection of pedagogy, psychology, and cultural intelligence. It is a field-informed design that understands the emotional labor adolescents undertake while navigating caste, gender, aspiration, silence, and survival.

What Makes Aakar Distinct?
It speaks with students, not at them. Every element is designed around adolescent epistemologies, how they learn, adapt, protect, and connect. It is emotional architecture in motion building the internal scaffolding young people need to grow with dignity in a society that often fails to see them clearly.

• It treats identity-building not as a vague goal, but as a cognitive, emotional, and social process with profound mental health implications.

• It makes teachers co-authors of change offering them language, logic, and practices to respond meaningfully to student emotion.

Strategic Framing

• Introduce structured emotional literacy as a regular part of classroom life, not a temporary workshop

• Equip adolescents to articulate emotion, construct self-narratives, and interrogate harmful scripts early

• Build identity as a site of strength, not stigma, particularly for students negotiating marginalization

• Position emotional wellbeing as a developmental right, embedded in the school’s approach to learning and care

Project Components:

• Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Weekly modules combining emotion theory, self-reflection, storytelling, and dialogic practices

• Facilitated Student Workshops: Age-tailored spaces to practice emotional processing, boundary-building, and perspective-taking

• Teacher Co-Development Tools: Scaffolding for educators to become long-term stewards of student wellbeing, not mere content deliverers.

Adolescence is when the mind scaffolds the self. Yet most systems treat it merely as a phase to manage, rather than a horizon to build upon. In India, millions of adolescents especially in structurally disadvantaged contexts are expected to achieve, adapt, and conform, all while never being taught how to know or hold themselves emotionally. Aakaar responds to this vacuum with strategic design and deep pedagogical care. It reframes adolescent emotionality not as disruption, but as data, a compass for care, belonging, and possibility.