This intervention was designed for the Paniya Community who are a Particularly Vulnerable Tribe. This tribe faces high levels of deprivation in socioeconomic, political and physical aspects. They face many problems as a result of hundreds of years of oppressive servitude due to caste hierarchies and systems. 

I have written a two-part series highlighting their issues, 

Part 1: How I was introduced to the Struggles of Tribal Communities in Kerala, should give you a short overview of their current conditions.

Part 2: How to Destroy an Entire Community in Three Steps delves deeper into culture, history, struggles and identity. 

We started this journey of using storytelling to help the children aspire, tell their personal stories, think about their futures.

We started by defining what we really wanted to do and achieve. So we created 3 levels of decision making, each one more detailed than the last.

We wanted to let the children create their own stories using our tapestry tool. However, we also decided to make a sample tapestry just as a test prototype. Gopika and Veda- my teammates and dear friends- put their heads together to use a simple stitching method with any waste cloth to help the kids create these stories. I will not, however, be getting into the specifics of that in this project now. This project will focus on the sample story I wrote and the storyboard we designed. 

We needed cultural context to make the stories relevant and reachable to the kids. We needed to use metaphors that came from within the community and not entirely from our heads. For this reason, we organized and analyzed, whatever we knew about the community under the Causal Layered Analysis. The CLA helps us identify the invisible threads that run under societies and services. This was where we derived the metaphors that we used in the story.

The metaphors we picked after the doing the CLA were drastically different than before. We knew that their traditional dance, 'Vattakalli' is inspired from the movement of elephants, so we wanted to keep the elephants central to the story. The elephants represent their belief in themselves. The rain and the floods were an obvious reference to the 2018 floods. By moving up the mountains, I wanted to signify that the community was climbing up the social ladder. Helping the other community in danger was a metaphor for collaboration.

We kept the drawings elementary and the story flow, radial- like rays from the sun, illuminating their future paths

:This prototype is still not polished or final on account of how labor-intensive it is. For the second iteration, we are thinking of going to a velcro pad with readymade cutouts, so as to fasten the process.

This is the team that worked on this project.