Support A Young Girls Leadership Academy in India

Our flagship SELF Academy returned this year, bringing together 30 young women from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand to participate in a 15-day residential workshop designed to promote feminist leadership, knowledge and skill-building.

During the academy, feminist leaders worked closely with young women using the pillars of SELF - Storytelling, Expression, Leadership, and Freedom. The goal of the academy is to help them recognise their autonomy and realise their potential. This year, there was a particular emphasis on empowering the girls to understand the significance of storytelling and encouraging them to control their narratives by engaging with various storytelling mediums.

The young women received training on how to share their stories effectively, equipping them to become leaders in using storytelling as a powerful tool for community organizing, relationship building, and sparking action. They explored different mediums and approaches for sharing their stories on online platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The academy employed the public narrative framework as a potent tool for delving into the principles they uphold and how these principles shape their identities as leaders in areas that are meaningful to them. This framework enables them to construct communities, share valuable information, and, in the end, bolster their abilities as adept storytellers, thereby empowering themselves.

The workshops covered diverse materials, from lessons on feminist theory emphasizing the importance of women telling their stories, to practice as storytellers effectively. This focus ran parallel to SELF’s ongoing discussions on various gender-related topics, including consent, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and gender-based violence in online space.