About

Best Tellers is a social initiative that aims to equip children from underprivileged backgrounds with storytelling skills. The initiative seeks to help children explore the fundamentals of storytelling, narrative building, and creative writing in an accessible and interactive manner. An open field based approach is adopted to invite children and students from underserved communities in and around Mumbai.

The ethos of the project is celebrated through written curricula, engagement activities, and driving community centric change. The skills that the project seeks to impart revolve around writing expression, performing and community advocacy, and the end goal is to create and compile a monthly newsletter for their own communities to instill and promote a culture of writing.

In the process of teaching storytelling, the initiative intends to offer students a voice as well as an avenue of communication. Stories can help students negotiate the distance with which they talk about themselves and the world around them. This can allow greater freedom of expression. Given that stories imitate cause and effect relationships of life, the initiative can also help children bring structure to their thinking. Lastly, the initiative hopes to build a sense of empathy among children - as writing oneself or anyone requires attention and care to detail. At the end of their learning journeys, the hope is that children learn to think critically about people, emotions, and experiences.