Chhavi Khandelwal

India

Master of Public Policy, 2025 
Lincoln College, Elman Poole Scholarship
Funding: Oxford-Weidenfeld and Hoffmann 

Chhavi Khandelwal is the co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Saturday Art Class (SArC), a non-profit dedicated to integrating arts and social-emotional learning (SEL) into mainstream public education for children from underserved communities in India. An architect by training, she co-founded SArC in 2017 in her final year of college.

As the organisation’s Chief Design Officer, Chhavi has developed a grade-wise visual-arts curriculum that fosters SEL in children. She has established over 100 strategic partnerships with educational institutions in India and trained over 7000 teachers in creative visual-arts and SEL facilitation. These efforts have enabled SArC to provide art-based SEL to 1,78,000 children in India and 1 million children globally. Additionally, Chhavi has raised funding through various incubators and accelerator programs to scale SArC's impact. Chhavi is also an Arts for Good fellow with the Singapore International Foundation. At Oxford, she aims to gain a transnational understanding of access, equity, and justice in order to contribute to inclusive education policies across the globe.