After nearly 12 years as a media practitioner, I’ve come to believe change comes from documenting people’s lives with respect, despite our unequal identities, and that a story has to move a reader before it can move them to act.

Today I work across the for-profit and not-for-profit space to help organisations tell stories that are people-centric, fact-based, and felt, and not just informative. This approach comes from my work across business journalism, rural reporting, and social-impact communications, including time with Reuters and Dasra.

But the biggest part of that education happened at the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), where I spent over eight years reporting, editing, and building an audience for stories that might otherwise have stayed unheard. Under my strategy, PARI’s Instagram grew from near zero to 120,000+ followers by finding the visual and narrative language that let rural India’s stories travel far online, on platforms that disincentivised the unglamorous.

That same instinct led me to write two books for young adults: The House of Uncommons, on children living with HIV in India, and Ammini Against the Storm, set in Wayanad, about a girl who witnesses a disaster unfold in one of India’s most beautiful places. Both grew out of years spent in classrooms and communities across the country, and both ask the same question my other work does: what does it take to tell someone’s story without robbing them of dignity in the telling?

I hold a postgraduate diploma from the Asian College of Journalism and a multidisciplinary B.A. from St. Stephen’s, New Delhi.

If your organisation has stories worth telling, and worth telling well, I’d like to hear from you.

Vishaka George