Partner with us
If you are an organization or individual invested deeply in a local community in rural India, we’d love to hear from you.
What a partnership entails
Our partner organizations are the backbone of Voices of Rural India. We currently work with a range of community-owned or community-oriented tourism organizations that have been working closely with local communities in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Maharashtra and Gujarat over the years.
Partner organizations help us identify guides, homestay hosts and other members of the local community who could potentially be interested in sharing stories. Typically based on the ground, they help disseminate the training modules we create, brainstorm story ideas with potential storytellers and share story outlines with us.
Once commissioned, the storyteller begins working on the story in text, audio, photo essay or video form. The organization shares feedback with the storyteller, often based on their own understanding of the landscape, but always trying not to influence the local voice. Most organizations prefer to transcribe and translate the draft in English, so local nuances can be retained.
The draft is then shared with our virtual volunteer network, and further refined through questions to flesh it out, until it is ready for publishing!
Why partner with us
Voices of Rural India is NOT a marketing platform. But here’s what we hope you’ll gain by partnering with Voices of Rural India:
- A meaningful opportunity to help upskill the local community on digital storytelling
- Visibility for your work in the region through the stories that emerge
- Connecting with a niche community of readers who could potentially travel to your destination in the post-covid world
Each story on Voices of Rural India carries a profile of the associated organization alongside a profile of the storyteller. Similarly, the associated organization is tagged on social media when the stories are shared.
Some of our partner organizations have been featured on The Hindu, Conde Nast Traveller, Travel + Leisure and Outlook Traveller, as part of the coverage we’ve received for Voices of Rural India.
Things that matter to us
Within the Voices of Rural India team, we often talk about how responsible travel can facilitate ownership or equal partnership among local communities as opposed to the typical service provider model. We feel passionately about language justice, speciesism (compassion for all species alike, including human and non-human animals), conservation and equal opportunity, among other issues.
If you feel similarly, we’d love to hear from you.
Contact us
General partnership queries: voicesofruralindia@gmail.com
Shivya Nath: shivyanath@gmail.com
Malika Virdi: malika.virdi@gmail.com