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WHERE WELLBEING AND SOCIAL CHANGE GATHER

at Bangalore Creative Circus

21st & 22nd November, 2025

HOSTED BY
IN COLLABORATION WITH
PARTNER

ABOUT SUMMIT

Invoking the spirit of a hearth – the space around a fire, where since the dawn of humanity, we have met to gather, bond, and connect – the Hearth Summit is a gathering to spark a new culture of social change. The time is now to advance a vision where the inner wellbeing of changemakers enables them to be more impactful and effective at addressing our most pressing global challenges.

The Hearth Summits are groundbreaking events inviting changemakers around the world to explore and embrace the wellbeing for welldoing movement. Building on the success of The Wellbeing Project’s first-ever global summit in Bilbao, 2022, we hosted the first Hearth Summit in India, in Bangalore in 2024.

The 2nd Hearth Summit in India, is being hosted in Bangalore in 2025, and is focussed on shaping a culture of care!

 

Hearth Summit Bangalore is hosted by Bangalore Creative Circus, an urban living lab for regenerative systems, communities, and cultures.

Program

Hearth Summit Bangalore is a gathering to bring together diverse changemakers to advance a vision of the interconnected wellbeing of individuals, communities, systems, and planet.

The summit is designed to provide an emotional and intellectual journey exploring the relevance and need for wellbeing in social change, approached from many different perspectives. It will bring together around 200 changemakers who work at various levels and capacities, across sectors of climate, health, justice, equity, and education.

Rohini Nilekani

Keynote speaker

Aaron Pereira

Keynote speaker

Conversations at the Hearth: Wellbeing for Welldoing

Shruti Shibulal

speaker

Dr. Bindu Kutty

speaker

Vishal Talreja

speaker

Conversations at the Hearth: Ecological Belonging

Abhayraj Naik

Speaker

Dr Mala Kapadia

speaker

Naveen Vasudevan

speaker

Spiritual Ecology by Abhayraj Naik

Avoiding the Rat Race by Rajni Bakshi

Ancestral Healing by Sahil Raina

Dance of Oneness by Natasha Mahindra

Sufi Perspective by Basit Jamal

Thinking Living Ecosystems: A Framework for Organisational Wellbeing by Aakash Sethi

Art for Thought by Museum of Art and Photography (MAP)

Listen to You by Kshetra Foundation For Dialogue

Magic Carpet Ride by Viridus Impact Solutions

The Rest-less Changemaker by Foundation for Arts and Health India (FAHI)

Conflict Alchemy by Roy Jacob

The Conscious Breath by Arjun Lall

Farm to table meals by The Circus Canteen
Engaging collective practices like Dances of Universal Peace
Interactive art installations in the space
Co-creation of art
Captivating folk and classical fusion performances and experiences

Agenda coming soon

meet the contributors (2025)

Aaron Pereira

Project Co-Lead at The Wellbeing Project

Read More

Abhayraj Naik

Educator (Climate, Justice, Spiritual Ecology)

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Dr Achyuthan Eswar

Naturopathy Physician & Co-founder of NutritionScience.in & Sampoorna Ahara

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Aparna Uppaluri

Founder of Antara Advisory

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Aranyani

Dancer, Choreographer & Artistic Director, Vyuti Dance Company

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Arjun Lall

Yoga & Conscious Breath Facilitator

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Bryan Furtado

Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Let'z Talk

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Jasmeen Patheja

Founder, Blank Noise

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Kalyan Akkipedi

Founder, ProtoVillage

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Kotiganahalli Ramaiah

Founder of Buddideepa

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Ram Bhat

Co-founder of Maraa

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Ramnath Chandrashekar

Photographer-turned-educator

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Ranjini Rao

Writer, Professor & Curator, Quest Learning Observatory

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Romana Shaikh

Author, Educator, Embodied Presence Facilitator

Read More

Siddharth Venkat

Musician, Educator, and Sound Therapist

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Suprabha Seshan

Educationist, Forest Custodian and Earth Doctor

Read More

Vishal Talreja

Co-founder, Dream a Dream & Founder, The Cocoon Initiative

Read More

Attend (2025)

Hearth Summit Bangalore 2025 is an opportunity to spark a shared conversation around wellbeing in changemaking, build relationships and enhance collaboration, and co-create a strong, engaged and compassionate network of changemakers. Express your interest in attending now with this form

Express your interest

Contact Us

  • info@blrcreativecircus.com
  • hearthsummitbangalore@gmail.com
  • 12/2 Yeshwantpur Industrial Estate, Bangalore 560086

© 2025 Hearth Summit Bangalore.         Web Experience Engineered by Sorcify Labs

© 2025 Hearth Summit Bangalore.
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Aaron Pereira

Keynote Speaker

Project Co-Lead at The Wellbeing Project

Aaron is excited about the interplay between our inner lives and the broader world. Aaron Pereira is currently Project Lead for The Wellbeing Project. The Wellbeing Project is focused on catalysing a culture of inner wellbeing for all changemakers. It emerged from a 7 year sabbatical ending in 2012. The Wellbeing Project is co-created with Ashoka, Georgetown University, Impact Hub, Porticus, the Skoll Foundation, and Synergos.

Aaron worked with the Guggenheim on an urban labs project, co-founded a pilot social enterprise to address housing issues in Mumbai slums, and explored neighbourhood life through a project in Paris. Aaron was co-founder of CanadaHelps and Vartana. CanadaHelps engages over 3 million Canadians and raises over $400 million a year for social sector organizations. It also works with over 20,000 charities on capacity issues. Vartana was focused on addressing financing needs in the social sector. Vartana played a key role in the early development of the field of social finance in Canada, and with early policy development that led to significant financing for social enterprise. In addition Aaron co-founded a multimedia business in the early days of the internet.

Aaron is an Ashoka Fellow and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. Aaron completed a degree with a minor in Economics from Queen’s University, studied at Oxford University as a Skoll Scholar, and completed an executive education program at Harvard.

Aaron Pereira was born in Goa, and grew up in India, the Middle East, and Canada. He now loves making his home in Paris, with a lot of time in India.

Abhayraj Naik

Speaker & workshop facilitator

Educator (Climate, Justice, Spiritual Ecology)

Abhayraj is an activist, educator, community builder, and system change practitioner. His current work focuses on decolonial climate justice, spiritual ecology, and transformative learning. He coordinates strategy and research at Pipal Tree (https://www.pipaltree.org.in), and is a co-founder of the Initiative for Climate Action (https://actionclimate.org), a visiting faculty member at Krea University (https://krea.edu.in), a justice/transformation/evaluation consultant, and an advisor to a number of progressive social and environmental causes in India and other parts of the world. He is also the vision-holder for: an online resource space -“Climate Justice India” (https://climatejustice.in), an emergent educational network called the South Asia Network for Justice Education (https://sanje.org), and an upcoming centre for spiritual ecology in Bengaluru, India.

The workshop and conversation will explore facets of spiritual ecology

Dr Achyuthan Eswar

Yoga & Naturopathy Physician, TEDX Speaker, & Co-founder of NutritionScience.in & Sampoorna Ahara

Dr. Achyuthan Eswar dedicated his life to healing without medicines when his grandparents significantly reversed Diabetes, Hypertension and Obesity through lifestyle changes in just ten days.

Dr. Achyuthan is a Yoga and Naturopathy physician from SDM College of Naturopathy and Yogic Sciences.

He is empowering people to ‘Be Your Own Doc’ using the latest, evidence-based nutrition and yoga.

In 2014 Dr. Eswar co-founded PHC Lifestyle Clinic and NutritionScience.in, an evidence-based nutrition website. His clinic and website have reached 50,000+ people today through nutrition programs, cooking courses and personal consultations.
Their online programs include experts like Dr. Vamitha Rahman from PCRM and Chef Nina Curtis who prepared the plant based meal for Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his White House dinner.

In 2019, Dr. Eswar co-founded SampoornaAhara.com, India’s first Whole Food Plant Based Social Enterprise to make Healthy Eating Easier. Today, he and his team have home delivered 200,000+ healing meals healthy food products all over India. Their fantastic cakes, cookies, snacks, and desserts are popular among all age groups and groups like BCCI, FANUC, AT Kearney, and HCL.

Dr. Eswar and his team are spearheading the lifestyle medicine revolution in India today.

Aparna Uppaluri

Founder of Antara Advisory

Aparna Uppaluri is a global executive and a senior philanthropy advisor. She founded Antara
Advisors, a specialised philanthropy and research and strategic advisory. She is Special Advisor to the Grow for Climate Fund and serves on the advisory bodies of Equal Measures 2030, and the Sustainable Futures Collaborative. She was the Chief Operating Officer, leading philanthropic programs at the Tata Trusts with operational and strategic planning oversight over all thematic areas including livelihoods, health, nutrition, WaSH as well as Arts & Culture. In a previous role, she served as Senior Global Program Officer at the Ford Foundation and acting Program Director of the Foundation’s India, Nepal, Sri Lanka office. Her global work has included nurturing philanthropic collaboratives, intergovernmental partnerships, and strategic field building. She led the Science and Society Program at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), India and founded a performing arts collective which she ran for 10 years.

Aranyani

Dancer, choreographer, researcher, educator and Artistic Director, Vyuti Dance Company

Aranyani is a Bharatanatyam dancer, choreographer, researcher and teacher. Over time, Aranyani has developed her own distinctive approach to Bharatanatyam, inspired by her explorations of Bharatanatyam in greater depth and engagement with other movement vocabularies. It also prompted her to approach dance academically. Aranyani wrote her thesis at Oxford University on the multiple modernities within Bharatanatyam and has written several articles in newspapers and journals.

Aranyani is Artistic Director of Vyuti, which attempts to transcend the tradition-modernity binary and offer another perspective on Bharatanatyam. Hailed as an organic conversation between tradition and modernity, Vyuti has performed in India and abroad to critical acclaim.

Aranyani is also the co-founder of “Re-Cognising Dance”, an academic online platform that aims to bridge the gap between dance scholarship and practice; and ‘Indian Dancers for Gaza’s children’, an artist-led humanitarian initiative to raise awareness about the plight of children trapped in conflict zones. Through this initiative, Aranyani has organised over 30 fundraisers across the world and raised over $22000 for the children of Gaza.

Aranyani is empanelled with ICCR and is centrally featured documentary films on dance Bharatanatyam commissioned by PSBT India and MAP, Bangalore. Aranyani continues to practice, teach and perform based out of Bangalore.

Arjun Lall

Workshop Facilitator

Breathwork Facilitator

Arjun learns (ed) yoga from his mother, her stories and her old books, injuries and heartache, many masters (young and old), his charioteer, eagles, acceptance, abundance, silence, new books and the internet, his breath, wife and daughter.

He retired from a two-decade career in corporate law to explore the breath – mind- body relationship through conscious breathing practices and mindful movement. He is certified yoga teacher (RYT 500) and a breath coach and facilitator.

He shares his love for yoga and the breath through group and one on one classes at his studio in Frazer Town, Bangalore – Ujjayi Movement Studio. He works closely with corporates on building a culture of consciousness, coherence and community through conscious breathing, mindfulness and other modalities.

His workshop will explore the conscious breath. The workshop will feature some different breath modalities, setting the tone for a deeper self-discovery dive, just with the power of the breath

Bryan Furtado

Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Let'z Talk

From global leadership to creative campaigns, Bryan now leads Let’z Talk in India – bringing people and organisations closer through fresh, human-centered storytelling

Bryan is an employer branding and recruitment marketing expert who blends creativity with strategy to spark real connection. With a career that’s taken him from event management to television to global leadership, he’s now back in India, leading Let’z Talk—a movement to make emotional safety and honest conversation the norm at work.

He understands the pressures employers face today: building cultures that drive both performance and wellbeing. His superpower? Crafting bold, human-centered approaches that help organisations stand out and speak to the heart. Known for his creative edge and warm, fluent messaging, Bryan thrives on finding fresh ways to bring people and workplaces closer together.

Kotiganahalli Ramaiah

Workshop Facilitator

Founder, Quest Alliance

Aakash is empowering unemployable youth to navigate the future of work & learning in India by mastering 21st century skills through self-learning. He is integrating the culture, tools and practice of self-learning in the Indian education and vocational training system and transitioning teachers as champions of 21st century skills.

Quest Alliance’s approach to organisational design and development is grounded in the belief that we function as a living ecosystem, where each part is interconnected and vital to the whole. Drawing inspiration from permaculture,
where every element is intentionally designed, they have embraced structures that allow us to stay adaptable, continuously evolve, and keenly listen to the worlds outside and within.

In their process of nurturing the soil, they have redefined how we co-exist as a system, our leadership and people philosophy, our strategy for growth and sustenance. Essential nourishment to this ecosystem comes from our cultural ethos: WIBE (Wellbeing, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity).

The workshop will explore the core design principles of permaculture and their adaptations to organisational evolution in creative and inspired ways

Kalyan Akkipedi

Founder, ProtoVillage

After quitting his corporate career in early 2008, Kalyan traveled exclusively through rural India for about 2 and ½ years, and slow-traveled for 1 year through the central Indian tribal communities right from Kuchchh all the way to the Sundarbans. Having lived with scores of families that were below the so-called poverty line and right down at the bottom of the pyramid, his views on development and poverty turned 180 degrees.
Instead of reacting or responding to the symptoms of poverty, he wanted to create a new possibility in which poverty just cannot emerge. He found the idea of “creating Resilience” more empowering than that of “eradicating poverty”.

Kalyan has been living and working in a remote drought-prone village called Tekulodu in the second driest and one of the poorest districts in India (Anantapur district, Andhra Pradesh) since August 2011, to co-create ProtoVillage – the prototype of a Resilient village being built by the villagers, for the villagers. His vision is a rural India that is a network of resilient communities.
Kalyan has an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, and Masters in Business Administration.
Kalyan is a Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellow and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network since 2016.

Kotiganahalli Ramaiah

Founder of Buddideepa

Kotiganahalli Ramaiah, is poet, pedagogue, playwright, philosopher, and cultural activist since the 1970s. In his early years, he was one of the founding members of Dalit Sangharsh Samiti and has contributed to ending caste discrimination in Karnataka through a mix of public activism, journalism and mass mobilisation. His work has pioneered community-rooted cultural movement in Karnataka by blending theatre, film, education, and oral traditions. The consistent focus of Ramaiah’s work is to nurture an anti-caste-consciousness, dignity, and creative expression among marginalized communities in the Anthargange/Shivagange region. His work in Kolar – first through the renowned Adima Arts and Cultural Centre and now through the Buddideepa organisation has served as a “living school” where children from communities living in Kolar learn through experiential arts—acting, storytelling, public speaking, and traditional crafts. He has written more than 30 plays for children, and is a prolific author of several books. As one of the foremost public intellectuals in Karnataka, he continues to write and speak on a wide range of contemporary public interest issues.

Ram Bhat

Co-founder of Maraa

Ram Bhat is a co-founder of Maraa, a media and arts collective. As a proponent of democratizing media and communications, he worked to set up some of the first community radio stations in India and has trained community media teams all over South Asia. His doctoral research is about the ways in which digital infrastructure, as an indispensable part of daily life, has shaped both politics and identity in India. He has also written extensively on the emerging problem of misinformation and hate speech on digital media networks.

Ramnath Chandrashekar

Photographer-turned-educator

K. Ramnath “Ram” Chandrasekhar has spent twenty years listening to the wilderness; walking along rivers, tracing the edges of oceans, staying in rainforests, and climbing glaciers. A photographer-turned-educator and community organiser from India, Ram has captured not just the beauty of the natural world but its silent cries for help. He carried these stories into classrooms, where over 50,000 children have rediscovered wonder, curiosity, and care for the planet. Today, as co-founder of the Youth Conservation Action Network (YouCAN), Ram and his partner Rachita are building a movement, empowering a new generation of educators across India to weave ecology into the heart of schooling and rewild learning for a healthy and conscious world.

Ranjini Rao

Writer, Professor and Curator of Programs, Quest Learning Observatory

Ranjini is a communications professor, coach, speaker, writer, and workshop facilitator. In a career spanning over 25 years, she’s written six books, taught over 10,000 hours across global classrooms, hosted more than 60 writing, cooking & culture immersion workshops, written over 150 articles and columns in newspapers, hosted and participated in several panel discussions, and curated food experiences for local communities.

Romana Shaikh

Author, Educator, Embodied Presence Facilitator for inner leadership and collective liberation

A global education leader and presence oriented facilitator, Romana integrates the science of trauma with the wisdom of wholeness.

‘Weaving Wholeness’ is her first book and her social enterprise that nurtures intergenerational, intercultural and intersectoral communities of Love and Justice — where leadership is cultivated through a process of healing intergenerations, shifting power and expressing truth.

Over the past 2 decades, she has developed her expertise in facilitating personal and systemic transformation that weaves an understanding of the human body-mind, sexuality, power relations and systemic oppression. Romana’s experience spans across fields of mental health, education, peacebuilding, social entrepreneurship, and leadership. This combined with her lived experiences makes her a distinct and compelling voice in the revolution of Love and Justice.

As the co-founder of Kizazi, a global not for profit, she has led the development of education models that are contextually responsive and restorative of culture and identity in various parts of the world. She is a Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow and serves as a teaching assistant for the Presence Oriented Psychotherapy Diploma. Previously, she served as the Director of Training & Impact for Teach For India and as a faculty member for Comprehensive Sexuality Education Certification with Seeds of Awareness.

Siddharth Venkat

Collective Practice

Sound Exploration with Xenkat!

This collective practice will feature a short activity bringing us together into the world of rhythm and melody. We will journey together as one through soundscapes in a brief, yet smooth sojourn, facilitated by Siddharth Venkat (Xenkat). Playing with and observing our combined breath, bodies and voices, and finally ending with an immersive Sound Bath.

Xenkat is a musician, educator, and sound therapist with a unique approach to using sound and indigenous instruments as tools for reflection, introspection, and healing.

Suprabha Seshan

Educationist, forest custodian and earth doctor

Suprabha Seshan is a long-term custodian of the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Wayanad. She intertwines rainforest conservation with community-based ecological nurturing, facilitating immersive educational programs to rewild humans. Suprabha’s essays have been featured in The Indian Quarterly, Local Futures, The New Internationalist, The Journal of Krishnamurti Schools, Countercurrents.org, Scroll.in, and The Economic and Political Weekly. She is a recipient of the UK’s Whitley Award for Nature and the Green Teacher Award from the Sanctuary Nature Foundation.

Vishal Talreja

Speaker

Co-founder and Trustee of Dream a Dream and Founder of The Cocoon Initiative

Vishal co-founded Dream a Dream along with 11 others. Vishal is an Ashoka Fellow, an Eisenhower Fellow and a Board Member at PYE Global and Goonj. He has previously been a Founder Director of Unltd India and Board Member of India Cares Foundation. Vishal is a Steering Committee Member of Karanga – A Global Alliance on Social Emotional Learning and Life Skills. He is a Founding Member of The Weaving Lab – A Global Learning Ecosystem of weavers who are advancing the practice and profession of weaving thriving learning ecosystems. He is a Founding Member of Catalyst 2030 – A global movement of social change innovators collaborating to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He is also part of the Informal Working Group on the Future of Education & Skills 2030 project by OECD where he has been a Co-chair and Moderator at various convenings.