This week I’m attending #UNLEASHLAB2017, a global innovation lab where 1,000 talents from around the world gather to create real, scalable solutions to the Sustainable Development Goals.

For the last three years I have dedicated myself to building bridges between storytelling, environmental justice, and the parallel issues of water and climate change.

Humans are storytelling creatures — so much so that we tell ourselves stories even while we are asleep. As a student of Folklore & Mythology (B.A. Harvard, 2014), I have learned that while numbers and data points are an important piece of understanding climate change, the risk in communicating in purely numerical terms is that we dehumanize the issue.

First-person stories are a powerful way of building empathy (and cultivating science literacy) across lines of difference. Storytelling helps give a human voice to sea level rise, permafrost loss, intensified storms, migration patterns, biodiversity loss, and other impacts of the climate crisis. When we know the story of someone who is impacted, it becomes more difficult to ignore the issue.

My goal is to create a platform for human stories about water and climate change.

Since the September 2014 People’s Climate March in NYC I have recorded interviews with nearly 700 storytellers in the USA, Fiji, Tuvalu, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Qatar, Morocco, the U.K., Canada, and China.

I want to make these stories accessible to students, educators, policy makers, artists, and curious minds the world over.

I set myself the goal of collecting 1,001 stories, a nod to the character of Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights. I’m nearly 3/4 of the way there.

As I learned from my time at the 2016 U.N. climate talks in Morocco, the older generation is not fixing climate change, so my generation has to think differently and act creatively to address environmental injustice and a host of related issues. The conversation isn’t including the right people, so I make a point of seeking out underrepresented voices.

(I plan to extend this project to all seven continents — which still leaves Africa, South America, and Antarctica. If you have suggestions for communities I should visit, please let me know!)

I’m coming to UNLEASH via China, where I spent a month recording stories ranging from folktales about carrying wishes across the ocean at low tide––to the large-scale movement of water from the south of China to the north via pipelines––to the impact of coal mining on drinking water in surrounding areas.

My work intersects with Sustainable Development Goals:

6: Ensure access to water and sanitation for all

13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

At the 2017 UNLEASH Innovation Lab in Copenhagen I hope to find collaborators (both for design and coding) who can help make the 1,001 Stories map a reality.

I’m interested in any storytelling-based collaborations––ways that I can lend my skills in audio recording and editing to other projects.

I would also love to record stories about water or climate change from other UNLEASH talents. Come find me! I’ll be wearing a cardboard sign that says “tell me a story about water” on one side and “tell me a story about climate change” on the other.

For more on the journey, visit devi-lockwood.com and my blog onebikeoneyear.wordpress.com. Older posts here. You can also support my work on Patreon.

1,001 Stories on Water & Climate Change was originally published in UNLEASH Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post explores questions about privilege and gap years, and uses Omprakash EdGE as a case study of alternative models.

Taking a gap year doesn’t have to be expensive.

In the wake of Malia Obama’s announcementthat she will take a gap year, articles like this one written by Robin Pendoley celebrate super-expensive programs like Global Citizen Year for having good scholarships.

At Omprakash, we don’t think having scholarships for expensive gap year programs goes far enough.

If we are serious about making gap years more accessible to a wider range of students, we need revolutionary program models.

The core belief of Omprakash is that positive social change begins with human relationships.

Omprakash works to make global volunteering more ethical, educational, & affordable.

It is always free to connect with our 160+ partner organizations online. There you can find an opportunity that will match your needs, as a volunteer, with that of the partner organization.

You contact the partner directly — there’s no middleman, and we don’t sell “placements.” We do urge participants to join our tuition-based training and mentorship program, which is way more affordable than what our competitors offer (and worth it).

The Omprakash approach is a deliberate disruption of the “placement” model, which disempowers both volunteers and their host organizations by turning a volunteer experience into a commodity, rather than a mutually beneficial relationship.

One key way that Omprakash works to undermine the commoditization of volunteer experiences is to make sure that volunteers are educated about bias, power dynamics, and privilege before they start volunteering.

Good intentions are not enough.

Omprakash stands against the commonly held view that little to no training is necessary to volunteer abroad. That assumption is made possible by some very damaging stereotypes. The misconception goes like this: these poor people need our help, and all you need in order to be a useful volunteer is to be a nice person!

If you’re interested in seeing what this looks like, check out Barbie Savior––they do an awesome job of highlighting this strain of problematic thinking.

The sentimental narrative that global poverty is caused by a lack of compassion runs the risk of overlooking structural issues. Voluntourism founded on this narrative distracts from larger questions about capitalism, inequality, and poor government.

Our answer to this problem in the industry is Omprakash EdGE, a comprehensive online learning platform that extends before, during, and after the international experience. EdGE prompts students to ask questions, confront their cultural context, explore deeply, and build committed relationships.

The typical pre-departure course is 12 weeks, but we customize it to fit the needs of many different audiences. EdGE is not a static curriculum. EdGE is a robust and dynamic online learning environment that we are constantly modifying and expanding.

Omprakash EdGE students are guided online, both during and after the 12-week course, by mentors who have research and professional experience in fields like international education, public health, anthropology, and gender studies.

I have worked as an EdGE mentor for almost two years. It’s awesome to see how my mentees’ critical thinking skills develop over the course of the semester, and during their time volunteering.

There’s magic going on in the EdGE classroom. The key ingredients? One-on-one mentoring, and course materials that start a conversation.

Omprakash EdGE course materials are fodder for a vibrant conversation online.

Every week, students post their reactions to the course materials in a roundtable discussion. EdGE mentors prompt the students to ask deeper questions, and to reflect on their own privilege months before entering their volunteer site.

On the Omprakash blog, EdGE students and partner organizations share stories, resources, and experiences long after their field positions are complete.

Each EdGE student completes a capstone project, which can be creative, analytical, or a hybrid of the two. The pre-departure section of the course prepares students with research methodologies and encourages them to ask the right questions. Dialogue continues long after the course has completed on the blog.

Here’s a table that breaks down our costs compared to our competitors’ for a summer internship in India, assuming costs of $10 per day.

The EdGE program fee is $750, and in-country costs vary by Partner site. The EdGE cost reported here assumes in-country costs of $10 per day (on the high end for many of our Indian Partners) for a twelve-week internship, which follows our twelve-week pre-departure online training.

Over 85% of our 169 Partners worldwide list their average daily cost at $25 or less.

Omprakash has not simply figured out a way to cut costs for a gap year or volunteer abroad experience. At every step, the Omprakash model is more ethical and relationship-driven. It’s not a perfect model, but it is a work in progress, founded on the idea that conversations matter.

The good news? The ethical route also happens to be way more affordable.

Our competitors’ placement model is more expensive because it requires heavy-handed administration. Someone in an office in the USA chooses an organization that may or may not suit the needs and interests of the volunteer. These expensive programs often have a (foreign) chaperone on the ground, adding further cost to the volunteer.

There are benefits to this kind of hand holding, but at Omprakash we think the costs (not only economic, but also in terms of a more filtered experience) outweigh the benefits.

Are you the kind of person who is more comfortable traveling in group of Americans and always being under the supervision of American chaperone? Would you be nervous knowing that your in country supervisor doesn’t speak English as a first language and perhaps doesn’t have a college degree? If so, then Omprakash is not a good fit for you, and you should travel in a group of Americans in a supervised network.

On the other hand, if you’re someone who wants to be truly immersed, who looks forward to the opportunity to be an apprentice to local leaders regardless of their formal credentials, and who would rather work for a locally founded & locally led grassroots organization (including all of the challenges that come with that) than some polished outpost of an American corporation, then Omprakash is for you.

None of our competitors offer comprehensive online training, nor do they actively partner with universities to ensure that student learning is of a high standard worthy of academic credit. Likewise, most do not offer participants any platform for continuing engagement, whereas our blog has been created specifically for that purpose.

Our partner model is unique in that these are not “Omprakash projects” that exist only for the sake of hosting volunteers, nor are they independent organizations where we “place” volunteers for a fee. Rather, Omprakash Partners are autonomous organizations that recruit volunteers based on their own needs and vision.

It’s a relationship-driven model, from start to finish.

Omprakash is founded on the idea that positive social change begins with human relationships. Will you join?

Like what you hear?

Share this post with a friend who is considering volunteering abroad, or anyone who argues that a gap year is too expensive to be accessible to the broader community.

You can keep up to date with Omprakash happenings by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

We look forward to continuing the conversation with you there!

I need lots of grounding these days.

As a solo female touring cyclist, I am constantly moving though air. Wind rushes and streams around my body. My bicycle tires slice through the road’s shoulder. For a year now, I have balanced on top of it all.

I have to keep moving less I fall.

After dancing in the park I lay down in the grass next to a set of acrobatic rings. I studied the clouds. I studied the way the green weaves itself into softness. I studied the dirt on the soles of my feet. I sent love to my legs — they do so much work for me daily. Movement is the language I come from.

A twenty-something guy walking a pug came over to introduce himself. “Do you mind if I do pull-ups?” he asked.

He tied the pug’s blue leash around the wooden post that holds the rings and started doing pull-ups in sets of five, his knees parallel with the ground.

“I do this every time I pass by the rings,” he said, shaking his arms out like loose rope. “It’s a ritual.”

I nodded. I understand rituals. Dancing under trees is one of mine. A second is honoring swing sets. I always stop for swing sets.

“Three months ago my mom committed suicide,” he said. “I’ve been telling lots of people because I have to get it out. And you’re a listener, I can tell.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your mom.”

“It just is.” He leapt up to the rings for a second set. The pug sniffed the grass, walked in a circle, and lay down. “I box now.”

Back on the ground, the boxer told me what it feels like to deliver a punch — his goals for fighting internationally.

“I’m good at knocking people out,” he said. “I express myself with my fists. I used to fight a lot, to get really angry, but now I channel that anger into boxing. It’s great.”

I nodded and shifted my position, stretching my back.

“Three months ago I had another job, one that paid better, but my mom’s suicide was a wakeup call. I drank for a month. I couldn’t face myself. I couldn’t face how much it hurt to lose her. Now I don’t drink at all. I’ll go to a pub and drink water — water with lemon if I’m feeling fancy. There are more important things than losing control.

“That’s the one good thing to come out of it. I’m more directed now. More directed and more open.”

He smiled and jumped up to the rings once more.

“Maybe hanging like this will stretch out my arms,” he said. “All the best boxers in my weight class have longer arms. It lets you deliver the punch from a distance.”

—

It’s curious that the boxer said I was a good listener.

For the last year and two months I have been traveling around the world by bicycle and by boat on a self-directed mission to collect 1,001 stories from people I meet about water and/or climate change.

When people are comfortable with it, I make an audio recording of their story.

My journey began with the September 21, 2014 People’s Climate March in NYC. To date I have recorded 441 stories in the USA, Fiji, Tuvalu, New Zealand, and Australia. I am currently based in New Zealand to write a book proposal.

The plan down the line is to make a map on a website where you can click on a point and listen to a story someone has told me from that place.

Somehow this project — this listening that I engage in daily — has become a part of me.

When I’m not on the bicycle, I wear a cardboard sign around my neck with the prompt: “tell me a story about water” on one side and “tell me a story about climate change” on the other.

I wasn’t wearing my cardboard sign in the park (sometimes I need a break), and yet there was a human with a story, walking his neighbor’s dog. He approached me, let his words out in vertical bursts, and then he left.

“You’re a listener. I can tell.”

Something about passing through a landscape (briefly, fully, balancing on two wheels) compresses interactions into the space of a breath.

I make space for storytelling in everyday life.

I meet people and then I leave, or they leave, and what remains is their story — a record of an interaction.

I carry those 441 voices with me on an external hard drive inside a plastic bag tucked in my bicycle panniers. I carry those voices up hills, through endless cow paddocks. Soon I will carry those voices into a room where I will sit and re-listen. I will listen and I will write.

And when my body is too full of stories, I will dance outside, barefoot. Then I will write some more.

I write things down so as not to forget. So much can happen in the space of a one-on-one conversation.

I’m afraid of forgetting. Do other writers have this impulse?

I want to remember who I was when I met each storyteller. I want to get to know someone by giving myself permission to notice the details of what they say. Rhythmic architecture.

I am an auditory person. When I meet someone, the first thing I notice is the musicality of their voice — how they let the taste of a word linger on their tongue or send sentences flying into the ether. Breath. Intonation. Word choice. Sometimes my favorite thing to do is close my eyes and listen.

In my sophomore year at Harvard I took a kick-ass course with Prof. Robin Bernstein called “Race, Gender, and Performance.” This course introduced me to the work of Anna Deavere Smith, an actress, playwright, and professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts whose art inspires my own.

Back in the 1980s, Deavere Smith began interviewing and recording stories from people across the United States. Then, using the exact wording of the recordings, she translated those interviews into performance pieces. In her TED Talk, Deavere Smith outlines her creative processes and performs excerpts from her solo show “On the Road: A Search for American Character.”

So my grandfather told me when I was a little girl, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.” And having grown up in a segregated city, Baltimore, Maryland, I sort of use that idea to go around America with a tape recorder — thank God for technology — to interview people, thinking that if I walked in their words — which is also why I don’t wear shoes when I perform — if I walked in their words, that I could sort of absorb America. I was also inspired by Walt Whitman, who wanted to absorb America and have it absorb him […] Everything I do is word for word off a tape. And I title things because I think people speak in organic poems.

— Anna Deavere Smith (full transcript here)

“If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.” We are, in other words, made of the words we give breath to — the very sentences we speak into existence.

We build ourselves houses of words, and we live there.

We are the stories we tell ourselves.

—

I don’t want to forget the boxer’s will to live. I don’t want to forget his arms, their lengthening. I don’t want to forget the blue leash of his neighbor’s pug that twined around the pole as he spoke.

Listening, listening deeply, makes me feel alive in the world. Listening is one of my rituals.

There are as many ways to be an activist as there are people on this planet.

Deep listening (with and without an audio recorder in hand) is the path I have chosen.