"I imagine a future where there will be no boundaries, no borders but one land, one religion, humanity, and love. It'll be a world where everyone understands the real meaning of arts and education.

A world where instead of blaming the government we’ll find the root cause of problems and solve them together instead of leaving everything for the government to handle. A world where every individual will be aware of themselves and the world. I imagine a future where everyone including me is themselves and no one is lost in becoming somebody they are not. I imagine a future in which we inspire and are inspired by each other every day."

- Supriya, a Slam Out Loud student

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds face a lack of engaging opportunities to build creative confidence and are thereby disempowered to harness their voices to break the cycle of negative outcomes.

Art education has globally proved to build in children skills that help them be more employable and have better life outcomes, yet the average Art teacher: student ratio in India is 1:1400 ( according to an RTI filed by Slam Out Loud), giving children less than 20 hours of art education every year.

Slam Out Loud uses art forms like poetry, storytelling, visual arts, and theatre to help children aged 10-17 from disadvantaged communities find their voice. We work with professional artists and e-learning resources to help children build creative confidence. 

Our Programs

The Jijivisha Fellowship is our flagship program in which we work with professional artists help inculcate essential life skills to children from low-income backgrounds through the art forms of poetry, storytelling, theatre, visual arts, and photography. So far, through the program, we have worked with 100 artists and 6500 children across India. 

Each artist works with a group of approximately 30 students for a period of 1 year. The program expands into a 5-year intervention with a relay model. Through this, the students receive 108+ hours of arts-based learning per year. The program enables us to create assets and public goods. We scale them through our project, Voice For All.

The Jijivisha Fellowship seeks to build Creative Confidence, which is a combination of 21st Century Skills and Socioemotional Skills. To measure holistic progress on the same, we use various methods of evaluation, including: student self-report questionnaires on Creative Confidence, evaluation on artistic skill-developing using our art proficiency rubric, surveys with our stakeholders (parents, teachers, school staff) for feedback, fellow progress evaluation through our arts-based facilitation rubric, and real-time data dashboards capturing information such as number of hours of arts engagement and students enrolled.  

Through comprehensive surveys of various stakeholders, including students, artists, fellows, and school staff, we have seen that: 

• 94% of our students say they feel excited to try new things and be creative
  
• 85% say they've grown (become more self-confident, creative, and so on) as a result of taking the class
  
• 95% say they discovered new concepts, skills, or ideas in class
  
• 100% Jijivisha fellows feel that they’re contributing to social change through their art
  

Voice For All brings together e-learning and community platforms. In Voice for All, children create and share original artwork upon completion of tech-based courses that are interactive, accessible in regional languages, free of cost, and adaptable to context. Art Melas provide an opportunity to showcase this art as well as the children's learning. With Pratham as our distribution partner, our first theatre course has been launched in 950 villages across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra reaching out to 50,000 children.

The survey in our first phase of implementation revealed that 82% of the students had a positive experience of the course while 94% of the students felt that the course motivated them to learn an art form. Qualitative feedback also revealed that the course was an enriching learning experience for students and the students expressed a desire for more such courses.

Slam Out Loud has worked with children across ten states in India, with over 15,000 original artworks created, and performances done for a cumulative audience of 35,000. 

We have worked with children and youth from low-income communities and conflict areas, Departments of Education of Kashmir and Maharashtra, parents, jail inmates, out of school children, and college-going students. 15 of our children have been TedX speakers, and the children have facilitated nearly 50 art workshops for adults and other children.

To find out more:

• The Swaddle | 14‑Year‑Olds Running Slam Poetry Workshops Prove Arts Education Shouldn’t Be an Afterthought
  
• NDTV | Slam Out Loud Brings Arts Into Education
  
• The Indian Express | Slam Out Loud: Changing the World Through Poetry