Amara: Teen Founder Making Music Education Accessible with Sarva Foundation
Education
India
18 Years
I’m Amara, the co-founder of Sarva Foundation, a social enterprise that makes vocational music education accessible to underprivileged youth in India. Although my background is currently in both music and business, my true passion lies where equity, education, and creativity occurs. As of now, I’m focused on scaling Sarva’s impact, improving certification outcomes, and building income-generating opportunities for young musicians from underserved communities.
While my brother and I have been fortunate to have our parents support our music education, we’ve seen many young people who have the hunger to learn, but lack the resources. Since 2020, our mission has been to make music accessible to talented youth, so that their potential isn't limited because of their circumstances. We believe that when young people pursue their passion, they contribute to a prosperous, peaceful and equitable society.
We provide globally recognised, vocational music education & training that helps undeserved youth choose to pursue music as a viable career path and achieve socio-economic independence Our social enterprise model offers high quality online music lessons at lower than market rates to incentivise learners for paying students. Using this revenue, we train & certify underprivileged youth, free of cost. For every paying learner, we can serve up to five non-paying learners!
Sarva’s model satisfies the triple bottom line by being socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable.
"Sarva isn’t just about teaching music. It’s about creating a platform where talent meets possibility, regardless of one’s background."
What inspired you to start your own business?
I visited a Gurukul–a traditional Indian school–providing vocational arts education to disadvantaged youth. That is where I saw an opportunity to put my musical knowledge to us. I realized I could use music as both vocation and vehicle for impact.
Soon after, I learned about institutional voids. These were gaps, inefficiencies, or dysfunctional elements within markets that prevent potential buyers and sellers from making a transaction. I realized that I could tackle these problems by launching socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable ventures. Dr. Devi Shetty's Narayana Health model inspired me to understand how to transform the voluntary vocational music training I provided to under-resourced youth into a revenue-generating social enterprise.
“Usually it's only boys who get to play the guitar or drums, but I’m a girl and learning, so I feel very good and this encourages me to pursue it further.” This quote, said by one of the Sarva Foundation learners, has stuck with me as I realized that especially for girls, vocational education provides them an invaluable skill and gives them the power required to break past mental and social barriers by being independent. Inspired by this, I became determined to ensure equity in gender amongst the Sarva Foundation learners. I started to understand the value of being the person that says 'yes, you can' when others might say 'that's not for you.’
How did you turn your idea into a business?
We identified a key institutional void in the music education market: inaccessible and unaffordable vocational music education for underprivileged youth, and solved it by creating a sustainable model that offers paid lessons to fund free, globally recognized training that empowers students to build careers in music.
Sarva is a completely self-sustainable and circular social enterprise, driven by The Employment Model.
Key milestones:
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Our non-paying students often didn't have the resources to afford instruments, especially during Covid. However, rather than letting finances or the lockdown deter them, we encouraged them to improve using utensils as makeshift musical instruments to practice on. They recorded for their RSL exams wearing face masks and performed brilliantly!
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We decided to build a community music room for our students, providing them with a dedicated space to learn and grow their musical talents. We used frugal innovation methods such as using recycled bricks and egg trays on walls to reflect and absorb sound waves. This resulted in our project being completed at 50% of the estimated cost.
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Till now, we have been able to RSL certify 115 youth, 103 of whom have scored more than 90% in their grade exams. Eight have received the India High Achiever Awards for receiving the highest marks in their respective grades.
How did you get your customers?
Sarva is bootstrapped. We’ve run small-scale crowdfunding campaigns and leveraged volunteer hours from students and musicians. So far, we’ve raised $20,000 through a mix of crowdfunding and paid lessons, which has been reinvested into operations—exam fees, instruments, and tech.
Our Goals:
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Augment our pool of Volunteer Student Mentors by partnering with more school
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Add more instruments such as Piano, Violin, Guitar, Vocals, Sitar, Tabla, etc to our service offering
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Increase our base of paying learners
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Partner with more youth-centered NGOs to increase the number of under-resourced learners
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Our ultimate dream is to transform Sarva into an on-demand, global, technology-driven, collaborative social impact marketplace for vocational education and training, and ultimately to an online non-profit university for all types of vocational education and training.
What is your average monthly revenue?
Our proudest metric isn’t just revenue—it’s impact per dollar. With every paying learner, we can train up to five non-paying learners, creating a scalable, equitable model for change.
How are you doing today and what plans for the future?
As of today, Sarva is growing steadily. What’s worked well is our sustainable pay-it-forward model, use of globally recognized RSL certification, and strong community partnerships. A key decision was adopting a train-the-trainer pedagogy, where certified students are now being mentored to teach future cohorts—ensuring scalability and community ownership. Post-COVID, digital learning trends and a growing interest in creative careers helped us gain traction. Going forward, we aim to expand.
What advice would you give to budding founders?
“Dream big, start small. But most of all, start.” - Simon Sinek.
Don’t try to focus on achieving everything at once. Create an action-oriented plan and stick to it.
Where can we find you?
Book Recommendations
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"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
