Dr Shreya Jha is co-founder of the Relational Wellbeing Collaborative, which undertakes research and consultancy that emphasises the centrality of relationships to wellbeing. Relational wellbeing is an integrative approach that investigates both the experience of wellbeing and the underlying conditions that promote healthy environments and happy lives.

Dr Jha’s thinking on wellbeing is grounded in foundational training in inclusive mental health practice, evolving through 25 years’ experience in programmatic interventions and research on mental health, disability, gender, children’s lives, and poverty and disaster reconstruction. Her work has involved extensive field research – qualitative and mixed-methods, team leadership, capacity-building, participatory evaluation, programme design and service delivery, as well as advocacy. Shreya's experience across India, South Asia, the UK and Zambia informs her cross-cultural sensitivity.

Her present focus centres on translating wellbeing concepts into practical frameworks for implementation and evaluation. Dr Jha holds a PhD in the Sociology of Development (2018) and an MSc in Wellbeing and Human Development (2008), both from the University of Bath in the UK, and a Diploma in Counselling Skills from Saarthak in New Delhi, India (2001).

Young people and relational wellbeing
“Our common stereotypes of young people view them in need of empowerment. Writing this I remember Ramesh, just 12 when he was removed from school and sent away to herd goats for a relative. He was soon entangled in child protection services when he tried to return home to escape his employer’s cruelty. By the time I met him at 16, he had left school voluntarily and worked at a construction site in Bengaluru, 500km away from home. He decided this himself, observing his mother’s hardships in eking out a living from mostly unyielding land. However hard his own working conditions, he was good-humouredly determined to earn enough to break the perpetual indebtedness in which his family was bound.

“Ramesh’s agency at this young age was intricately bound up with his context and familial relationships. All young people’s wellbeing is similarly complicated by sometimes fraught circumstances and relationships, both supportive and sometimes hostile. They sometimes have the same trade-offs that adults do, asking: Where does my family’s wellbeing lie? What can I do to make their lives better?

“In choosing, like Ramesh, they show us again how wellbeing is deeply embedded in our relationships.”