Make a Sustainable Place to Play in the City

We’re often asked “How do stories work?”

We’re asked this because that’s what we do all the time, all day and all week long. 

Every year, year on year, we create more stories.

I’ve been doing it for a while and so I pause, smile, shrug, hoping the silence, the space of a moment will fill the void with the swirl of remembering your favourite story ~ was it the story itself, the colors, images, or who told it? Was it who read it to you that mattered to you the most, the time of day, how you felt, or was it the story itself, or a marvelous mix of everything?

Our big goal is to make stories that children can read themselves and find their own way to make sense of the chaos of the world around them.

We can’t, unfortunately, unlike the story you were first read or remember, be there all the time to read or tell stories to children. We wish we could be. 

But because we can’t be everywhere, we make stories, that can be more places than just one, two or 200 people. Stories can go very, very far.

Our art and design team, either in-house, or amazing freelance designers, work and rework images to tell stories, our team of writers, write and re-write in English and Hindi and test, test again, trying to come up with a story that in the end, inspires a young person, a girl, to want to finish it, a story that makes her want to come to school next week again and the week after that…

One of our all-time most successful stories we’ve ever made is one of the two graphic novels that Somesh Kumar made for us: Phulwa the Mechanic. 

Phulwa is a young girl mechanic in rural Bihar. She cycles everywhere on her pink bicycle and as she races through her village she sees two challenges ~ the traditional roles of girls and women where she lives + the fact that no one has electricity all day long. She puts both challenges together to find a solution: she builds a biomass enterprise to keep the lights on.

Year on year it’s the most popular story in our program. We still can’t put on fingers on exactly why, “Why exactly does Phulwa’s story work?” 

We know it’s a big hit with girls and with boys who now think girls run clean energy enterprises everywhere, just like that, they don’t just believe, they know its possible. 

But then again, as every story is remade again by the reader, perhaps you too can tell us what makes a story work, we’d love to hear your story.