Influenced by beliefs tied to the caste system, the Indian school education system is highly stratified and increasingly privatized. Segregated in public schools, the children from marginalized groups have limited cultural capital and few opportunities for acquiring it due to their separation from elites. However, cultural capital is crucial for well-being and for leveraging career opportunities. We document an elite-led social innovation project to build cultural capital among girls from marginalized backgrounds. We identify imparting agency and raising aspiration as two mechanisms employed by elites to facilitate the sharing and transmission of cultural capital, along with two enabling conditions, providing dignity and inclusion and stakeholder engagement, for building cultural capital among marginalized girls. The findings advance our understanding of mechanisms for addressing the societal grand challenge of inequity in school education.