Location: Your Jagah (Remote)
Experience: Experience working at the grassroots as a farmer, fisher, artisan, SHG leader, youth organiser, or volunteer.
Compensation: Competitive
Closes on: October 24
Stories as the Place Itself
जगह. স্থান. ஊர். ಊರು. स्थानम्.
Jagah. A word for place.
In Hindi, it is जगह — a space that holds memory and belonging.
In Assamese, স্থান (sthaan) — the ground beneath your feet, the rhythm of your river.
In Tamil, ஊர் (oor) — the village that raises you, the soil that remembers your name.
In Kannada, ಊರು (ooru) — where every tree and street knows who you are.
In Sanskrit, स्थानम् (sthaanam) — not just a location, but a state of being.
But jagah is more than geography. It is memory and kinship. It is where your river once ran clear. It is the Palash tree in bloom before the rains. It is the fish that arrive with the season, not the market. It is a mud house that stays cool when concrete bakes. It is the hillside where, at dawn, hundreds dig trenches for trees they may never live to see.
Too often, jagah is spoken about from the outside—flattened into reports, expert prescriptions, or silence. The Jagah Fellowship is an invitation for places to speak for themselves.
Requirements
We invite 6–8 fellows whose lives are inseparable from their jagah:
- Farmers, fishers, artisans, SHG leaders, youth organisers, grassroots volunteers.
- People already active in climate, commons, or livelihood work.
- Those who carry what they “cannot unsee” from their place—a memory, an image, a sound—and feel it deserves a voice.
You do not need to be a professional storyteller. What matters is your rootedness, your noticing, your willingness to let your place speak.
What the Fellowship Offers
- Duration: 6 months.
- Two immersions in your jagah (with hands-on editorial mentorship).
- Virtual learning circles on storycraft, formats, dignity, and distribution.
- Peer huddles for reflection and sharpening.
- A culminating event in one jagah, celebrated locally first.
Benefits
- A stipend
- A basic storytelling kit
- Travel support for local reporting.
- One-on-one editorial guidance.
What Will Remain
- For fellows: a story bank in your own language—maps, ledgers, photos, voices—that belongs first to your people.
- For organisations: a practice of place-based storytelling, with templates and tools to sustain it.
- For the ecosystem: narratives that travel, shifting climate stories from extraction to stewardship, deficit to dignity, “I” to “We.”
Apply
If you carry an image you cannot unsee, a sound that will not leave you, or a memory of your jagah that asks for voice—this fellowship is for you.
Find more fellowships!