Kiran Bir Sethi

Kiran Bir Sethi is a designer who became a teacher, a principal who grew into an education reformer and subsequently morphed into a social entrepreneur. A trained visual communicator from the National Institute of Design, she comfortably uses the language of design as a tool for user cantered innovation.

Sethi founded the award winning Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, in 2001. Riverside, is viewed as a laboratory to prototype design processes that uses a systems approach to build a culture of empowerment, graduating young citizen leaders with an ‘ I CAN Mindset’ – using their agency for the greater good. The values that nourish this mindset are the 5 E’s – Empathy, Ethics, Excellence, Elevation and Evolution – intentionally moving us to becoming HumanE, by design.

Riverside Learning Centre ( RLC ) started in 2016, has codified the practices and processes of The Riverside School, and housed them in 6 Pillars ( Curriculum, Parent Partnership, Personal and Professional Development, Community, Administration and Leadership ) and designed Training Programmes that empower more schools to become I CAN schools.

In 2007, Sethi founded 'aProCh'—an initiative to make our cities more child friendly, for which she was awarded the Ashoka Fellow in 2008 and was a YIDAN Fellow in 2019.

In 2009, Sethi launched “Design for Change” which uses a simple 4 step design framework – FIDS (Feel, Imagine, Do, Share) to cultivate the I CAN belief in all children. Today, DFC is the world's largest movement of change - of and by children, and is in 60 countries — impacting over 2.2 million children and 65,000 Teachers.

In 2023, Sethi published a book, ‘Every Child CAN’ for HarperCollins, which chronicles the journey and offers readers a glimpse into Riverside’s unique design-led approach to empowering children.

Over the years, Kiran, Riverside and Design for Change have won several accolades and Awards, and some of the most recent ones are:

• 2023 – Riverside wins the World’s Best School Prize for Innovation from T4 Education
• November 2022 – Design for Change is again included into the HundrED.org’s Hall of Fame
• In March of 2021, Kiran was invited to be judge for the prestigious YIDAN Prize.
• In November, 2019, Design for Change conceptualised and helped to host the first ever All Faith - I CAN Children’s Global Summit at the Vatican in Rome from 27th to 30th November, with participation of over 2500 children from across 40 countries, who were blessed by the Pope!!
• In October, 2019, she was awarded the Earth Prize in Luino, Italy
• In March 2019, she was amongst the first batch of the Chen Yidan Visiting Global Fellows at Harvard.
• In January 2019, she was honoured with the Lexus Design Award for 2019, in Pune, India
• In 2018, Kiran has been awarded the “Light of Freedom” Award, at the Vital Voices, U.S.A., Global Leadership Awards.
• In 2018 Edutopia covered The Riverside School for best practices. In 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 -DFC has been recognised as one of the 100 most innovative educational programmes in the world by HundRED.org (based in Finland).

Kiran currently resides in Ahmedabad with her Husband – Geet Sethi and two wonderful children – their son, Raag and daughter, Jazz. She loves listening to music, watching movies, singing, dancing and has an insane love for fruit-filled Dark Chocolates!!!