Inspiring Stories – Themes & Freelance Projects

About Inspiring Stories

Inspiring Stories is a MetaGood project (www.metagood.org) which seeks to unearth stories of inspiring individuals and groups who are doing work that is making a difference and enabling positive changes in our society. These stories would be captured through interviews, photo & video documentaries and would be disseminated over the MetaGood website & spin-off books.

Themes For Inspiring Stories

Inspiring Stories will run stories aligned to a few themes because this will allow us to have depth and focus and will also enable us to create spin-offs such as theme specific books that will be released under Creative Commons licensing at cost only pricing.

The 7 themes that Inspiring Stories will run (sequentially) are:

1. Inspiring Career Transitions: Stories of people who’ve made significant career shifts to follow their true calling often with leaps of faith, assuming financial risk etc. Examples in which the second career has a positive social impact will be STRONGLY preferred.
2. Social Entrepreneurs / Innovators: Social innovation has seen considerable growth over the last few years. There are a varied set of entities involved in social innovation investors (Acumen Fund), to innovation firms, to individuals. There are extremely rich models of how social innovation can happen. These stories will document social innovators and entrepreneurs doing their work in India.
3. Stories Of Sustainable Business: The way capitalism is structured right now is not sustainable from an ecological perspective. Earth is a closed system and cannot be mined endlessly for resources without significant ecological impact (by way of dwindling resources or by impacts such as climate change). The problem is that we’re tightly hooked to this brand of capitalism – any fall in growth leads to dramatic financial repercussions with rising unemployment. A more sustainable model of capitalism is needed and there are a few examples that exist. These stories will document these individuals & organizations who are experimenting with “Sustainable Capitalism”: it could be a person who heads a PE firm that invests only in responsible business or a small business owner who has tightly embedded Cradle to Cradle thinking in all her business processes.
4. Inspiring People In The Government: In India, adjectives normally associated with our government are inefficient, corrupt, incapable, regressive, brutal, inept, short-sighted etc. And to a very large extent this reputation is deserved. However, there are people within the government (bureaucrats / police officers / legal folks / civil servants etc) who are islands of progressiveness and capability. Telling these stories is important to enhance citizen trust and hope in our governmental machinery and to increase citizen engagement.
5. Stories Of Inspiring Underprivileged: There are a lot of people who live in financially adverse situations and yet do extremely inspiring work – in both full time and part-time capacities. These stories are especially important because they show how people can make a difference with extremely limited means. Examples could be a village lady who’s spearheading a campaign to prevent child marriage in her village.
6. Inspiring Students: Across India, there are hundreds of students (in schools and colleges) who are contributing towards a better world. These students participate towards creating a better world in multiple ways: volunteering with or starting non-profits, organizing positive activism, starting enterprises that generate employment, creating new products in their research labs or creating works of art, theater that have the potential for social impact. These stories will document the lives of such students and will try and inspire many more students into similar activity.
7. Inspire Social Change Movements: Movements such as the Slow Food Movement, Slow Money are bringing together individuals to enable positive change.  These stories will explore such movements in detail , enabling them to attract attention, resources and thus scaling up.

Theme & Story Formats

Each of the themes will run for 20 stories. Theme 1 will start first and once we’re through with 20 stories in it, we’d move to Theme 2 and so on.

Each of the stories within these themes will comprise of a mix of text and pictures. The idea would be to provide sufficient context & detail within each of the stories and thus the word range would be (strictly) between 3,000 & 4,000 words with 5–7 associated images.

Licensing

These stories would be put up on the MetaGood website and also other formats such as books for each theme. We’d be releasing the stories under a Creative Commons license enabling non-commercial reuse of the stories by other entities.

Freelance Writing Project

MetaGood is inviting experienced freelance writers (preferably magazine writers) to contribute stories to this project.

Writers would need to propose story ideas (consisting of details of the individual and a short note on why a story about them would be good). For each story idea that gets accepted, MetaGood would commission the writer and would pay Rs 10,000 upon the satisfactory completion of the story. We would also be receiving story ideas from other sources and will commission writers to write these stories.

We can also discuss commissioning multiple stories upon the satisfactory completion of the first story.

In such a project, it’s extremely important that the writers feel for the cause and hence we’d have conversations on the phone to gauge alignment before starting out with the assignment.

Next Steps

If you’re a writer and want to write some of these stories, please get in touch with Nirat Bhatnagar either on email (nirat@metagood.org ) or phone (+91 98996.92572) and:

• Please send in your CV that highlights your writing experience (professionally and personally)
• Please also include either links or attachments of your past professional writing / blog writing.
• In this mail, please suggest a definite story idea(s) on Theme 1 – citing specific people you know of who fit the bill. You may choose to withhold the name / contact information of the person if you wish to retain details of your story source. This is not mandatory – you may choose to write on one of the story ideas present in the MetaGood idea bank.