Sva Inner skills for navigating life.
We run NAVIGATE Circles: small peer groups where young people talk about the hard parts of growing up, with someone their own age listening.
By providing a safe place for deep, intimate discussions about life’s most challenging questions, Circles enable us to become fully human and truly alive, awakening to the enormous possibilities with each of us.Ask for the workbook Free. We post or email it to you ourselves, so tell us who you are and we will send it.
Navigate within.
Navigate together.
- Within
- Circle
- Together
The workbook goes in three parts, and so does a circle. You start with yourself, on pages nobody else reads. Then you sit with a few other people and find out how much of it they recognise. Then you do something with it, together.
Nobody has to arrive with a problem to be there. Most of what gets said in a circle is ordinary: a week that went badly, a thing somebody is dreading, a thing that went right. Saying it out loud in front of people your own age is the part that is hard to do anywhere else.
Todo the client is writing the copy for this circle. The two paragraphs above are drawn from the workbook’s own foreword so the section stands up in the meantime.
Four things happen, in this order.
Gather
The same small group, meeting on a schedule. Same people, same promise that what is said in the circle stays there.
Check in
Everyone speaks before anyone advises. One round, no interrupting, no fixing. Listening first is the actual rule, not a slogan.
Navigate
One theme at a time. Exam pressure, friendships, home, change. We practise a small tool for it together rather than talking about it in the abstract.
Signpost
When something is bigger than the circle, we help each other reach a counsellor or an adult who can act. Nobody carries it out of the room alone.
One session is forty five minutes, once a week. One student leads it and everyone else takes part. Leadership rotates each week, so it is not one person’s job for a term. A teacher protects the time and the room, helps the first leader prepare, and then stays out of it.
Four rules, and everyone knows them.
These are printed in the toolkit rather than left to whoever is in the room that day. The last one is the one that matters most.
Pass
Anyone can pass on a question, a turn, a drawing or a written answer, and does not have to say why.
Stay
People stay for the full session. If someone needs to leave, they tell the student leading first.
An ordinary concern
Anyone can raise something and pause the activity. The leader listens and keeps it anonymous. No teacher needs to be told.
Possible harm
If something suggests a person may be unsafe, the leader stops the meeting and goes to the teacher straight away. This one is not a judgement call.
And three things it is not.
Not therapy.
Nobody in the circle is a clinician and we do not pretend otherwise.
Not a replacement for a counsellor.
It is a way of getting to one sooner. If the circle is the only support somebody has, the circle has failed them.
Not run by an adult.
A trained student facilitates it. The first person anyone our age tells is almost never a grown up, and building around that fact is the whole idea.
Where we have got to.
As of 31 August 2026. A further 250 young people are being enrolled at the same school in September.
Hi, I am Shonairra.
I am sixteen, I am from Bengaluru, and I am studying for the IB at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland. I am going on to read psychology.
I started Sva because of something I kept noticing and could not unsee: people my age carrying heavy things very quietly, and doing an extremely good impression of being fine. Usually the thing that would have helped was one honest conversation, earlier, with somebody who was not going to panic.
For four years I have trained as a Well-being Ambassador at school, which mostly means learning to listen without immediately trying to be useful. Last year I interviewed seventeen adolescents for a study with ICMR and NIMHANS about what it feels like when a parent is on their phone. I was first author on it. Sva is what I did with the answer.
I wrote the NAVIGATE workbook because I know what it is like to carry something difficult without knowing how to manage it. I was bullied from a young age, and for a long time I thought everyone except me was coping. The more I talked to my friends, the more I found out that everyone was going through a version of the same thing.
Todo The second paragraph is assembled from documented facts in her register. The third is now drawn from her own foreword to the workbook, which is better than anything built from a CV. Confirm she is happy for it to appear here, and confirm she wants Institut Le Rosey named publicly.
Start a circle where you are.
Two books. The workbook is for the student: seventy six pages of activities in three parts, Within, Circle and Together. The coordinator guide is for the teacher, and is mostly about staying out of the way properly.
Both are free. There is no download button, on purpose: tell us who you are and where you are, and we send them to you ourselves. That way we know who is running a circle and can answer when something goes wrong.
If you are a school, say so and we will send the coordinator guide with it.
