Indigenous Fellowship

The Living Cultures Indigenous Fellowship

Times of crisis create moments of radical change. The emergencies we are living through today offer us the opportunity to break harmful trajectories. We are at a turning point, and the planet urgently needs powerful voices to radically transform our world.

Radical transformation can only happen when you are able to voice it and to be heard.

With the support of the Bertha Foundation and the Staples Trust, InsightShare is implementing the Living Cultures Indigenous Fellowship, a groundbreaking strategy that delivers remote training to Indigenous Peoples wishing to harness participatory media as a tool for engaging and mobilizing their communities.

The programme has supported 38 young Indigenous leaders based in 6 hubs across Africa working with them to use communication technologies safely for self-determination, self-representation and positive local action.

We believe that young Indigenous Peoples, and the cultural traditions they belong to, have much wisdom and experience to offer human society at this critical crossroads. Yet, Indigenous Peoples remain the most marginalised and the least heard: 80% of the world’s biodiversity is on Indigenous lands, but Indigenous Peoples are often criminalised and even killed for protecting these territories. These issues are compounded by lack of access to communications technology and connectivity, low literacy and the erosion of traditional languages and knowledge.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which inspired global protests in 2020, demonstrates the importance and power of linked-up global press and digital and social media activism. These tools give voice to silenced groups and allow movements and solidarity to take root. We are working with Indigenous Peoples of Africa to ensure they too can access these media tools, and lead and inspire radical transformations.

A Decolonising Approach

Indigenous peoples’ disenfranchisement is closely linked to colonisation, globalisation, and systemic inequality. Colonialism and racism persist in our societies and the development sector is not immune to it. 

When working with local communities, international organisations often impose their own assumptions and solutions rather than sharing the power with the communities they are working with.

InsightShare is committed to breaking down colonial cycles, to to rejecting top-down approaches and to see the rise of new structures that challenge traditional approaches. We believe that young leaders are the experts of their needs and issues. Our approach is founded on bottom-up communications: we are led by our Indigenous partners and support them in the ways they desire to fertilize the growth of their networks.

– Seno Tsuhah, Programmes Director NEN Nagaland, India

Media as a tool to strengthen Indigenous leadership

Indigenous peoples and cultures have often been misrepresented by mainstream media. 

Community-based Indigenous media offer Indigenous youth the opportunity to be their own storytellers and to use media to advocate for their rights, to speak with knowledge on critical issues and to protect their cultures, languages and traditions.

Through the fellowship, young leaders are learning how to use tools like video cameras, phones and radios, as vehicles for expression, information and dissemination. Fellows are using media to share their wisdom on environmental protection and to ensure the survival of their cultures and languages. Community radio stations delivered in Indigenous languages can also provide crucial access to information to community members who are based in remote areas and are not fluent in national dominant languages.

Our Online Model

We use a ‘design-thinking approach’ to ensure that the Fellowship best supports Indigenous facilitators. Consulting with Indigenous associates, we have developed an online and offline programme that best supports the needs and desires of our partners. Using a flipped-classroom approach, we have adapted our resources and toolkits to create a visual and comprehensive curriculum that is not reliant on continuous internet connectivity.

Worldwide travel bans caused by COVID-19 put a stop to face to face workshops. We took this as an opportunity to restructure our training model to facilitate the fellowship remotely.

We are connecting with youth based in some of the hardest-to-reach communities on the planet, through remote live training and weekly meetings. Youth leaders are supported by a lead trainer and a team of local and international mentors, who give local and global contexts to their practice.

This innovative approach allows us to reduce our carbon footprint and develop a more sustainable, accessible model of training which can be easily replicated in local languages.

Our remote learning approach also enables a collective online space, in which Fellows can connect, exchange and coordinate across borders, forming the cornerstone of an Indigenous-led network of practitioners.

The Fellowship follows four learning phases to ensure that each step of the learning journey will focus on specific objectives and outcomes.

Be part of our fellowship journey and follow the story on our social media and our newsletter.

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Would you like InsightShare to replicate its online training model within your organisations for an advocacy, research, capacity building or monitoring and evaluation project? Then get in touch with us at info@insightshare.org 

InsightShare’s Living Cultures Indigenous Fellowship is part of a long term strategy to support the growth of autonomous Indigenous media networks.

Ambitious actions need collective support! Any donations submitted to InsightShare support the long term legacy and sustainability of this project.

Support for this programme is spearheaded by the Bertha Foundation.