Shaheen Mistri

Profile of Shaheen Mistri

Shaheen Mistri is an Indian social activist and educator. She is a founder of the Akanksha Foundation, an Indian educational initiative in Mumbai and Pune, and is also the CEO of Teach For India since 2008.

Shaheen Mistri was born in Mumbai, India in a Parsi family. She had an international upbringing and grew up in various countries, including Lebanon, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and the United States as she moved countries with her father, a senior banker with Citigroup. After attending boarding school in Connecticut, she moved to India for higher education. She graduated with a BA degree in Sociology from St. Xavier’s College, University of Mumbai and later obtained a Master’s in Education from the University of Manchester. Before launching the Akanksha Foundation, Shaheen’s interest in children’s education led her to volunteer as a teacher in diverse organizations in Mumbai, such as the Happy Home and School for the Blind and the E.A.R. school for the Hearing Impaired.
Shaheen Mistri, as a young college student, walked into the Mumbai slums and expressed her desire to teach the less privileged children who roamed the streets. To fulfill this goal, she founded the Akanksha Foundation, a non-profit organization working primarily in education, at the age of 20 to impact the lives of such children. Over a period of 20 years, her Akanksha Foundation, which started with just 15 children in one center, now teaches 3,500 children in 58 centers and six schools. In the summer of 2008, she took on a leadership role at Teach For India which enlists India’s most promising college graduates and young professionals to spend two years teaching in low-income schools and attempt to bridge the educational gap in the country.

The Akanksha Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to impact the lives of children from low-income communities, enabling them to maximize their potential and change their lives. Akanksha works primarily in the field of education, addressing non-formal education through the Akanksha center and also formal education by initiating school reform through The School Project.
Currently, Akanksha reaches out to around 4000 children through two models: the after-school or center model and the school model.

Akanksha has 40 centers and 13 schools in Mumbai and Pune. Through the centers, a commitment is made to support each child by providing a strong educational foundation, good time, self-esteem and values, and to help them plan how they can earn a steady livelihood as a step towards improving their standard of living. The School Project is a venture to open high-quality schools serving children from low-income communities in Mumbai and Pune. These schools are in partnership with local municipalities, with the vision of creating small clusters of model schools in these cities that can be used to impact the mainstream education system.