Antarang Foundation envisions a world where every young person is passionately, productively and positively engaged in a career of their choice. Through two career focused programmes, CareerAware and CareeReady, the foundation works to bridge the employability gap that exists amongst disadvantaged youth.

Antarang aims to build self-reliance in youth through key life skills and employability skills. Antarang works to bridge the gap between education and the future for young people at the threshold of adulthood.

Antarang works with youth ages 14 – 25 through a structured career readiness curriculum as part of high schools in Maharashtra, Goa and Rajasthan. The primary objective is to encourage students to stay in formal education for as long as possible and to assist youth from disadvantaged backgrounds in bridging the gap between education and employability and launching themselves on a fulfilling career.

The foundation has also built a strong community of professionals who come on board as mentors to guide the young participants until they successfully complete the first year of their final placements. This has helped ensure that the dropout rate of their graduates in the first year of placement hovers at only 20% versus the national average dropout rate of 80%. At the time of writing, the Antarang Foundation has supported 120,000 at-risk youths.

• Priya Agrawal’s initiative, Antarang Foundation, is challenging the paradigms in career linkages for children from low-income backgrounds who are at a high risk of dropping out of the education stream and falling into the informal exploitative sector. Her organisation breaks the stereotypes around job opportunities deemed fit for these children and equips them with soft skills and social wherewithal to pursue a career, not just a job, of their choice. She is working with an empowering process of reflection and marriage of strengths and reality with dreams to give a path to each child to stay the course and make good of life at a high risk of falling through the cracks.
• Antarang has pioneered excellent and intensive career guidance and career readiness to be offered as part of high school and higher secondary school education in all state-run schools in Mumbai, Pune, Goa and Udaipur districts.
• Priya has identified missing pieces that cause the failure of traditional career linkage programmes (particularly for at-risk youth) and has designed a sequence of interventions that can be plugged into existing models to help them reach their full potential. She demonstrates the entire chain of interventions through her work at Antarang. She sees an opportunity to tap Government schemes that focus on training the youth toward employment and other citizen sector organisations that aim to reinstate at-risk youth to scale her impact.
• Antarang works in partnership with the government and other NGOs
• Priya’s uniqueness lies in her unflinching belief that these children must be given the legitimacy to dream and the tools to assist and motivate them to stay the course. She achieves this by introducing career readiness as a subject in high school delivered by facilitators armed with skill sets and mindsets to translate the adolescent’s dreams into a lucid career path/life path with tangible milestones. The curriculum works on concepts and frameworks that many children think about for the first time in their lives. Starting from what strengths look like, to identifying some of their own to working with Rosenberg’s scale of self-esteem, the children explore critical questions such as “What is the link between regularity, punctuality, initiative and how people perceive me at my job?”

• Priya is an Ashoka Fellow, the most respected recognition for social entrepreneurs worldwide.
•  Priya is also from the first cohort of Aspire fellows, selected by Societal Platform as one of the 30 innovations that can change the world. https://aspire.ashoka.org/fellows
• Awarded as one of India’s top first-mile responders during the COVID crisis by the World Economic Forum. https://www.ashoka.org/en-ch/story/ashoka-fellows-world-economic-forum-top-50-covid-19

Mentions in public forums

• Changemaker Priya Agrawal, founder of Antarang Foundation, India
• BMC widens career horizon for students and families, hopes to ‘break cycle of poverty’
• School’s over…. what next? Antarang helps you navigate the plethora options