Empowering Change: An Interview with Savio Pashana of Salaam Bombay Foundation

An interview with Savio Pashana, Head of Communications, Salaam Bombay Foundation, a non-profit organization

In this enlightening interview, we speak with Savio Pashana, Head of Communications at Salaam Bombay Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering adolescents from underprivileged backgrounds.

Established in 2002, the foundation focuses on providing education, vocational training, and life skills to students in BMC and government schools.

Savio shares insights into the foundation’s impactful programs, which have transformed the lives of over 400,000 young individuals, equipping them with the skills needed for a brighter future.

Can you tell us a little bit about Salaam Bombay Foundation?

Savio Pashana: At Salaam Bombay Foundation, we strongly believe that poverty should not define a child’s future. We engage adolescents through in-school skilling programmes and after-school academies in arts, media, sports, and vocational skills.

These interventions build self-esteem, instill life skills, and equip them with tools to pursue education and financial independence.

We thus ensure that children from under-resourced communities have access to the tools that help them make the right choices around health, education, and livelihood.  Ultimately, we aim to break the cycle of poverty, hopelessness, and limitation in a single generation. 

What are some of the key programmes and initiatives currently being implemented by the foundation?

Savio Pashana: Our interventions begin in middle school and continue into adolescence, following a continuum model that spans five distinct academies and structured alumni pathways:

• Preventive Health Education Programme (PHEP): Focuses on life skills, mental well-being, nutrition, and tobacco refusal. Students become health leaders in their schools and communities. This is for all students who are associated with Salaam Bombay Foundation, before entering one of the following 4 academies.
• Arts Academy: Offers training in performing and visual arts such as music, dance, theatre, and painting, thus transforming hobbies into viable career pathways.
• Media Academy: Builds core skills in photography, filmmaking, podcasting, journalism, and content creation, enabling students to tell their stories with clarity and impact.
• skills@school: Delivers vocational training in beauty, mobile repair, electrical work, bakery, automobile repair, and more. These hands-on modules help students start earning while still in school.
• Sports Academy: Promotes fitness, discipline, and teamwork through structured sports training. Many of our students go on to coach others or pursue careers in fitness and sports.

Alumni enter our Entrepreneurship Incubator or internship pipelines, and select entrepreneurs qualify to pitch for seed funding at Dolphin Tanki.

What challenges does the foundation face in achieving its goals, and how do you address them?

Savio Pashana: One of our biggest challenges is changing mindset among adolescents, families, and even systems that poverty limits potential. We often work with students who enter our programmes with  limited exposure and little belief in their own futures.

We address this by starting early, with children in Grade 7. Our programmes are designed not just to build skills but to build confidence.

Additionally, sustaining engagement across our beneficiaries’ developmental journey, from early adolescence to adulthood, requires continuous innovation, strong partnerships, and adaptive strategies.

What role do volunteers play in the foundation’s operations, and how can individuals get involved?

Savio Pashana: We engage volunteers who are domain experts to take sessions on Financial Literacy, Photography, Painting, and other skills. Fitness enthusiasts can also engage with the students from our fitness programme.

Volunteers play an important role in mentoring, training, and providing exposure to new perspectives. Whether it’s an expert from the creative arts mentoring our media students, or a finance professional guiding our young entrepreneurs, real-world insights are invaluable.

Corporate volunteers (employees of our corporate partners) help our students understand the workings of their companies, provide technical insight, and even help organise walkthroughs of their workplaces.

We welcome individuals and organizations to join us as mentors, or guest faculty. They can reach out through our social media handles. What we ask for is time, empathy, and a shared belief in the power of possibility.

How does the foundation adapt its strategies in response to changing social issues?

Savio Pashana: We operate in communities where social and economic challenges evolve rapidly. For example, post-COVID, we noticed a spike in mental health concerns and reduced income opportunities for families.

We responded by expanding our focus on emotional well-being and entrepreneurship readiness. Our teams conduct regular ground-level assessments and research to identify emerging needs.

Programmes like DreamLab (our alumni bridge programme), expanded mental health modules, and access to digital tools are all results of adaptive thinking. We see ourselves as both responsive and resilient.

What partnerships have been most beneficial for the foundation, and why?

Savio Pashana: Strategic partnerships are critical to our model. Collaborations with academic institutions like NMIMS Mumbai (for mentoring our Dolphin Tanki entrepreneurs), with corporate CSR partners for funding and skill development, and with government bodies for school access have been game changers.

What are the foundation’s future goals and aspirations in the coming years?

Savio Pashana: Our aspiration is to deepen and scale our impact, reaching more adolescents not just in Mumbai but also in the other cities that we operate in. We want to ensure that every adolescent we touch is not only skilled but empowered to make confident life choices.

We are expanding our entrepreneurship pipeline, refining our alumni programmes to create long-term impact, and investing in research to measure outcomes more meaningfully.

Most importantly, we aim to be a thought leader in grassroots empowerment, showing that with the right support, children from low-income families can rise as creators, innovators, and leaders of tomorrow.

As we wrap up our conversation, Savio Pashana’s passion for empowering youth through education and skill development is evident.

Salaam Bombay Foundation’s commitment to bridging the gap between education and employment continues to create sustainable change in the lives of disadvantaged adolescents.

With innovative programs and strong partnerships, the foundation is not only shaping futures but also fostering a generation of confident, skilled individuals ready to contribute to society.

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