Arvind Ojha Desert Fellowship
- Desert
- Rural Immersion
- One Year In Village
- Financial Support
- Mentoring
- Network Development
- Institution Building
- Storytelling
- Knowledge
- Mistakes & Learning
Final Stage of the Fellowship Selection Process
मरुभूमि में प्रेम है, रंग हैं, जीवन है, जीवट के साथ।
रेत के समंदर में असीम सुनहरी संभावनाएं हैं। जरूरत है नौजवानों की जो अपनी जमीन, अपना देस छोड़ किन्हीं झूठे सपनों के पीछे भागने की बजाय अपनी धरा में बदलाव रचें।”
Arvind Ojha was an experimentalist choosing to dedicate his life to social changemaking through education, working with children, making institutions and keeping people and organisations together. Someone very forthcoming to dialogue and collaborate with youth. Perhaps something that kept him innovating with community for over 40 years in social sector.
He was an artist, storyteller and a social changemaker. In his early years he wrote extensively. Prose and poetry were his forms of storytelling. He used camera to capture his times and stories, principally focusing on desert.
Later years, he committed to working with communities of Thar desert in the remote places and contexts. His innovations and models have today evolved into institutions and reflect in the people who stand tall in their values and actions.
Arvind Ojha remained a creator and a dreamer working on smallest little things and taking on challenges in desert. He responded to each silence of nothingness with hundred ways of creative changemaking. Unafraid of loving and trusting, He keeps inspiring the people he touched.
This fellowship is a celebration of his values, ideas, experiments and work. It is an attempt to take forward his work and continue building the collectives he strived for.
Our Dream
To foster high potential youth towards sectoral excellence and social leadership having a special bond with deserts, and eventually growing into a committed network of changemakers. We hope to see this network of changemakers evolve into a Global Desert Partnership, engaging with a wider group of thinkers, innovators, entrepreneurs, changemakers, storytellers and explorers.
Overview
Deserts are bioregions enliven with innovation, resilience and faith. Arvind Ojha Desert Fellowship Programme derives these as core values deeply ingrained in the approach & design of the programme.
The fellowship programme will be an opportunity to dream; to be mentored by practitioners and theorists alike; to live in desert; to get knowledge & resource support and, most importantly the space to make mistakes and learn therein.
It is visualized to be a unique one-year immersive experience of living and working with desert community. Principally based on the idea of ‘Plural’, the fellowship will enable opportunity for collective exploration, synthesis and action.
Participants will explore the bioregion – its land, life, living; synthesize the complex socio- economic-cultural linkages of each with other(s); and, design their unique interventions to respond to those in their medium and domain.The fellowship programme will follow mentor facilitated do-it-yourself design.
Key themes the Fellows will be exposed to and work on will include Pastoralism, Rainfed agriculture, Textiles & Handicrafts, Education, Environment action, Climate change. The medium for interventions by Fellows will be diverse, broadly categorized in two segments – (a) Institution building (b) Storytelling. Various aspects in both the segments will include engaging with community, dialogue with stakeholders, designing programme interventions, writing, reading, planning, reviewing and more planning.
Fellowship Segments For 2022
Institution Building
Solving Small But Solving Strong
Storytelling
Asymmetry of Human Development
The most effective way of interpreting and communicating complexities is by the means of storytelling. Deserts are full of stories. Stories of people & possibilities; land & water; struggles & resilience; music & silence; of the trees, before and after; stories of development and beyond. All these and many more deserve to be told by storytellers whose passion flows over any obstacles of limitations. The storytellers who look at art and stories as the means for beyond!
One of the two segment for the fellowship programme this year is storytelling. We are looking for storytellers who very strongly desire to look at desert and human conditions through art, and, use their unique medium to tell a story. The medium used by the fellow could be cinema, writing, music or any other capturing the imagination and attention of reader or viewer. Fellow will work closely with a set of mentors to refine the theme, idea and the product, justifying one full year of work by the fellow.
How The Fellowship Will Work
The Arvind Ojha Desert Fellows will operate out of a desert village in selected field area. They will get two months of time to acquaint themselves with the local culture and people. During this period, they will be mentored by range of experts and thought leaders. In the two months the Fellows will come up with their intervention ideas. Fellows will use the balance of their Fellowship duration to develop their idea into an institution or a story product. During the entire duration series of thematic dialogues, discourses, panel discussions, mentoring sessions will be organized.
- Dreamers who are responsive and sensitive towards environment, community, diversity and culture
- Who are creative and have the ability to think critically and analyze
- Have a strong resolve to act upon grassroot issues, opportunities, challenges
- Is a leader in thinking and work approach
- Is guided by values and principles
- Any individual between the age of 18-40
- Can come from any region (rural/ semi-urban / urban), nationality or gender
- Should have at least completed schooling education till 12th or equivalent
- Should be nominated by someone who knows the nominee well. (Village Head, Institutional Head, Mentor, Teacher, Line Manager or any community elder).
- Should be very adaptive to diversity and local culture & lifestyle
- Should be committed to relocate to a village in the desert for 1 year
- Should be willing to develop a vision and willing to work on a rigorous action plan during the course of fellowship
- One year Fellowship to five high-potential individuals
- Bespoke mentoring by domain experts and sector leaders throughout the programme
- Fellow gets up to INR 5 lac per annum grant custom designed to finance the Fellow and the Fellowship project
The Selection Process
Arvind Ojha Desert Fellowship
Twarita
Twarita is from Jodhpur, she completed her graduation from Maharaja Sayajirao University with Psychology Hons. in the year 2022. Her inclination towards art began in school in the form of graphics, terracotta reading and in conversations. Prior to the fellowship she has a brief experience of documentation exploring relationships with water and with victims of POCSO. She feels her formal education, especially graduation, has today limited her in lines which time and again have been crossed with strokes sometimes with black and others with crayons. The fellowship is to Imagine and being a part, water and children are her chosen domain, water just not living while its flowing though that has moments of beautiful calming uncertainty, contradictions but the one living in desert, hidden,playing which offers its heart in innocence like of children, which is not aware of itself not scared of itself. The word water for her cannot quench what the eyes see and the shiver like the sound of silence.
Rakesh Yadav
Rakesh Yadav is from Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh. He is inspired by the writings of the social development leaders and he aims to follow their footprint. He has been a part of the process of teaching and learning with children and youth in the social sector for the last 8 years. For the past 5 years, Rakesh has been trying to cherish stories of social change by collaborating with artists and making his art a part of social change.
Sunpreet
From Delhi, Sunpreet has always had a keen interest in films and videos which led him to study Mass Media. He graduated in Journalism and Mass Communication from IP University. He started working as a freelance photographer and producing video coverage for live events of Music Bands and festivals, From 2019 to present he has been shooting non fiction films for the development sector. While on a project in the Western Rajasthan, he found that the desert biodiversity is very interesting in terms of landscape, environment patterns, cultural knowledge of natural resources and stories of the land, life and living. He is expecting the fellowship to be a platform to share the stories of the desert.
Tony
Tony is from Gurugram, Haryana. He has completed his bachelor in Agriculture Sciences, he chose agriculture sciences as he wanted to work at the grass root with small and marginalised farmers. Prior to the fellowship Tony had worked in climate smart agriculture and holistic rural development programmes. Tony wishes to work for input cost reduction in agriculture and contribute in changing lives , building the future of society. This fellowship will help him in achieving the goal of sustainable agriculture.
Tejaswi
Tejaswi Singh is natively from Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh. She graduated from the National Institute of Fashion Technology with a degree in Fashion Design, Rae Bareli and is an Alumni of SLS DAV, Delhi. Tejaswi believes that provoking one's thought process is an important element in life, and She portrays the same in her work. And she experiments with her core ideas of abstract and blend with the originals to keep the antiquity. During her Graduation Project at IMARA, Banglore and workspace exposure at Medhya, Jodhpur and Design Executive at Desert Resource Centre. Tejaswi had the opportunity to work with a brand label and on Desert Designs where she explored multiple sectors of designing. Her experience of nearly 3 years has enabled her to excel in her as a the Desert Fellow, where she focuses on storytelling through graphics, illustrations, fashion, and photo stories.
In Partnership With
Funding Support
