When Manasi Mehan (HGSE '24) was working towards a psychology degree as an undergraduate student in Mumbai, she became increasingly interested in how elementary education affected children’s lives.
Her studies at the Jai Hind School, conversations with classmates and family, and experience working with children sparked ideas that would eventually become Saturday Art Class, a nonprofit organization that provides visual arts and social emotional learning education to children across India.
Saturday Art Class is one of 19 startups in the Harvard Innovation Labs' 2024-25 Launch Lab X accelerator for Harvard alumni founders, and won $25,000 in the President's Innovation Challenge last May. When Mehan returned to Harvard this fall, she shared how Saturday Art Class grew from a single-school initiative to an organization impacting hundreds of thousands of elementary school students.
Listening to students' requests for the arts
After college, Mehan originally thought she would pursue a PhD in psychology. But one of her college classmates loved her experience working for Teach for India, a prestigious two-year teaching fellowship. When Mehan received a Teach for India email about a final application deadline, she decided to put together an application.
Mehan was still unsure if the fellowship would be the right path for her. In the end, she decided to take the advice of her grandfather, who said the experience would give her the opportunity to “Learn about life the way school can never teach you.”
During the fellowship, Mehan’s main goal was to increase the child’s reading, writing, and mathematic levels. She was doing everything possible to increase learning times in these areas, and recalls the day when one of the students came and asked, “Why are you converting every art class into an English, math, or reading class?”
Increasingly, students and their parents were asking Mehan if there was a way to incorporate more art into their school day. Mehan recognized that a better arts education could offer children significant benefits around social-emotional learning. The school Mehan worked in also provided art supplies. All they were missing was an art teacher.
Meeting a co-founder who inspired a company name
Mehan started looking for volunteer art teachers in 2015 and 2016. People would often promise Mehan that they would volunteer, but they rarely showed up in the classroom. Then, at a friend’s birthday party, Mehan met Chhavi Khandelwal, an architectural student.
Khandelwal agreed to volunteer in the classroom on a Saturday and gave what Mehan described as “the most incredible class” where the children got to experience art material and make handprints. The class then brought these handprints together and used them as a starting point for a social-emotional lesson on teamwork and collaboration.
Mehan had yet to have an art teacher volunteer two weekends in a row, but Khandelwal was the exception. Mehan’s students loved having an art teacher who would come every weekend. It got to the point where every Friday the children would ask, “Is Chhavi coming tomorrow for Saturday art class?”
Kicking off with a crowdfunding campaign
After Mehan’s fellowship ended, she began applying for jobs while Khandelwal continued working as a full-time architect. Still, the two were volunteering to arrange art classes on Saturdays, and multiple Teach for India fellows were reaching out to ask for the curriculum they had developed together.
Mehan had a job offer in hand, but decided instead to “take one year to see if this need exists beyond the school we were working in.” She added, “We never looked back.”
In 2017, Mehan and Khandelwal raised money through a crowdfunding campaign to officially launch Saturday Art Class. “We spoke about our experience, and working with children across Mumbai,” said Mehan. “We shared images from the classroom on our Instagram. We reached out to friends and family and said, ‘This is what we’re doing. Come support us.’”
Saturday Art Class received what Mehan describes as “incredible” contributions of money and art supplies, as well as offers from hundreds of people to volunteer in the classroom. Through this crowdfunding campaign, Saturday Art Class was able to reach 1,200 children in its first year.
Building out organizational functions
In 2018, Saturday Art Class was accepted into the Teach for India Incubation Program for high-potential education startups, where Mehan describes learning how to grow Saturday Art Class from an initiative to an organization.
“The incubation program made us realize that we were pursuing one tiny aspect of our program,” she said. “Saturday Art Class was growing, and we needed to establish departments like compliance and finance, as well as mold our organizational culture.”
Looking back at this period, Mehan reflects on the benefits of diving into the work of providing children with high-quality arts education first, and building out the organization structure later, saying, “You need to understand your market and community and where you’re going to be working before you start bringing in your structures. It was a great way of progressing and learning as we grow.”
“You need to understand your market and community and where you’re going to be working before you start bringing in your structures."
Manasi Mehan, Co-Founder, Saturday Art Class
Evolving the organization’s strategic focus
When COVID hit in 2020, schools in India shut down for almost a year. Saturday Art Class volunteers lost access to their students, and the organization had to rethink its entire model.
As Mehan and Khandelwal planned their next steps, they recognized that teachers still had constant access to their students via remote learning. Quickly, they shifted their focus to supplying teachers with the training and support they needed to run art classes themselves. As they worked with teachers and saw them implement the Saturday Art Class curriculum, Mehan and Khandelwal saw that partnering with teachers as opposed to training volunteers would be a permanent change for the company. Mehan explained:
“We learned that the minute volunteers weren’t there, the intervention ended. But when you work with existing people in the schools, their impact is going to be a ripple effect because they’re going to constantly work with children throughout the year.”
Investing in continuing education
In 2022, Mehan and Khandelwal were having a conversation with one of their mentors about building a collective of entrepreneurs and early-stage organizations across India. As part of this process, the two founders had to write their one-year, two-year, and five-year plans. In responding to the question, “What would you regret not doing?” Mehan wrote down “Not getting a master’s degree.”
“I felt like I learned a lot on the go, but I wanted to understand the foundation of the work that I do,” said Mehan.
After reading the responses, the mentor urged both founders to go back to school. A month later, Mehan applied to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and was accepted into the class of 2024. In explaining why she chose Harvard, Mehan cited the University’s support of innovators and entrepreneurs, saying:
“I’d always heard about the Harvard Innovation Labs – it was one of the reasons why I chose Harvard. The i-lab is a space where you are a student and have this incredible source of support that can help you build you venture along with being a student.”
During her time at Harvard, Mehan was awarded funding through the Harvard Innovation Labs Social Impact Fellowship Fund for Saturday Art Class. Additionally, Saturday Art Class was a winner in the 2024 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, receiving the $25,000 prize in the social impact track.
“With the President’s Innovation Challenge, the amount of love and support I received from the advisors was incredible,” said Mehan. “It was some of the best feedback I’ve gotten, giving me perspective of the strategy and trajectory for Saturday Art Class.”
Scaling impact
Today, Saturday Art Class has a staff of 20 who focus on developing curriculum and growing the organization’s reach through partnerships across 13 states in India. These partnerships include nonprofits that work with schools as well as direct partnerships with the schools themselves and state governments. Additionally, Saturday Art Class has developed an award-winning WhatsApp chatbot called Art Connect, which helps the organization keep in touch with all its teachers across India.
The organization’s focus on partnerships has resulted in exponential growth. When Saturday Art Class launched in 2017, the organization served hundreds of children. In 2024, the organization is on track to reach more than 300,000 students.
Looking toward the future, Mehan aims to make art and social emotional learning a priority for India as a country. By 2030, Mehan has plans for Saturday Art Class to impact more than 5 million children. She explained, “India has the National Education Policy 2020, which talks about the arts, mental health, social emotional learning, and culture in schools. At Saturday Art Class, we want to put this policy into practice. By 2030, our hope is to reach millions of children.”
