Who you work with#
Dream a Dream is a Bengaluru non-profit that works with children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds. Its method is life skills and social-emotional learning, not academic coaching. It runs Thriving Centres for young people, works inside government schools, and has state hubs across India. It points out that 54% of India’s young people are not ready for work.
The situation#
A young person at a Thriving Centre wants a job, a course, or money to study. The information they need already exists. It is spread across dozens of websites, in more than one language, written for people who already understand the system. Government schemes for education, jobs, skills, business and financial support sit on separate central and state portals, each with its own rules and forms.
What is going wrong#
Young people find opportunities through people they already know. Their networks are small, so their options are small. Someone with an uncle in a bank hears about bank jobs. Someone without one hears about nothing.
Dream a Dream describes the failure as a sentence: young people can say “I am interested in this” but cannot say “I know what I can do next”. Interest does not turn into a step.
Why it is not fixed yet#
Job portals exist and are useless here. They assume a degree, a resume, a stable internet connection, and enough English to read a listing. They rank by employer need, not by what a young person could realistically get. Scholarship aggregators go stale within a year because the deadlines move and nobody maintains them.
The hard part is not collecting listings. It is judging which of them a specific person can actually get, and saying so honestly.
Skills and Expertise#
- Branch — CS, IT. Some room for design-minded students from any branch.
- Technical skills — Data collection and cleaning, search and ranking, retrieval over documents, multilingual interfaces, low-bandwidth front-end work.
- Other skills — User interviews, writing plainly for a reader who is not you, judging a source’s reliability.