Job Title: Project Lead, Aikyam Foundation

Location: Delhi

Background & Context

India is facing a significant youth mental health challenge. Across the 11–25 age group — in schools, colleges, coaching centres, and early work life — distress is common, often persistent, and largely unmet. Young people are dealing with multiple, compounding pressures: academic and career expectations, economic uncertainty, digital exposure, adverse childhood experiences, and structural inequalities that shape everyday life.

Yet the ecosystem of support remains critically inadequate. The interventions today remain concentrated on curative solutions like counselling (both private and govt), rather than promotion and prevention. There is limited focus on destigmatisation, upstream risk factors, or recovery. Government programmes such as NMHP and Tele-MANAS exist, but face some challenges in execution. India's mental health budget stands at ~1.5% of health spend against a global average of 3–4%.

About Aikyam Foundation

Founded in 2024 by Manisha Dhawan,



Founding Trustee of The Convergence Foundation (TCF), Aikyam Foundation is a not-for-profit that seeks to build resilient young Indians by strengthening system design for youth mental wellbeing (ages 11-24) in India across government, educational institutions, and civil society. In its current phase, the organisation is focused on defining its strategic direction, identifying and operationalising high-impact intervention areas, and building early models in partnership with government and ecosystem actors. These include efforts to drive destigmatisation and mental health literacy, strengthen the supply and scale of effective solutions, enable public systems (e.g., through initiatives like Tele-MANAS and national measurement frameworks), and build system-level platforms and toolkits that can be adopted at scale.

Aikyam is also a founding partner of the India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA). It is actively exploring partnership with stat

📌 Senior/Program Lead (Delhi)
🏢 The Convergence Foundation
📍 Delhi