Thank you for making me revisit my vision :)

When I think about my vision for the future, I realise that I would be content as long as I am able to earn a living using my unique skills to better the world. I want to live simply, in the midst of a loving family, supportive friends and a community where strangers smile and greet one another. I want to strive to maintain a balance between the time I spend on my personal health, working in challenging roles and the time spent with loved ones. I related to Gail Straub’s notes on taking back the wisdom of the feminine because I have also realized that it’s important to laugh, stay creative and always challenge oneself.

I have a few different communities but at present, the ones that are closest to me are those of WAVE women around India and that of my local community where I live in Goa. In my previous essays, I wrote about my goals of fundraising and developing a social entrepreneurship model to sustain WAVE. It gives me great joy that our website has been accessed in 94 countries because I feel that this is our small way of communicating inspiring stories of human good, perseverance and achievement created by women in India, with the rest of the world.

My ultimate vision for WAVE is to establish a pan-Indian, women-led TV channel, that airs high-quality, creative, educational and inspiring programs for and about the NGO sector in India. Since we have already implemented something like this online, albeit on a grassroots scale, I am hopeful that we can set up a satellite channel someday.

I would also like to contribute to my local community by starting a solar-powered, outdoors cinema, screening independent films and documentaries in multiple languages. The reason I think it’s important to start a cinema here is that there are no cinemas in the entire coastal tourist strip of North Goa and it would be good to create a space where tourists are able to assemble with locals, enriching the experience of both groups. My vision is to use the profits from the cinema to either fund WAVE’s work or to fund a new community radio station that I would like to start in Goa. Using renewable energy to power the cinema will also put out a positive message in Goa, which is undergoing rapid development and depletion of natural beauty.

I applied to be a Voices of Our Future correspondent because I wanted to improve my citizen journalism and web 2.0 skills so that I could use what I learn from World Pulse in future WAVE trainings here in India... In face, it seems like a perfect match for me. The timing is good too because I will have time over the next few months since we will be taking a temporary break from operations until new funds are secured, so I will be able to focus on the training program.

Since I started writing the essays, I realized that the act of articulating my thoughts, dreams and vision has been insightful and has enabled me to connect with so many interesting persons on PulseWire who have shared encouraging comments about my journal posts. I also hope I get selected because I think an empowerment mentor would support and guide me during the difficult transition period I’m going through right now with WAVE as I struggle with strategic planning and fundraising.

I have wanted to spend time studying and practicing creative techniques to effectively craft stories about difficult development subjects and I think the communications techniques that I would learn in this training program would help. Creative storytelling techniques are challenging to learn, but are essential for community media web 2.0 projects like ours because we have small budgets and train girls who often don’t have previous media knowledge. We work hard to make the videos interesting to watch for our diverse and discerning online audience. Finally, I think participating in WorldPulse’s citizen journalism training will boost my self-confidence and provide me with a nurturing new community of like-minded doers, and I can only hope that I am worthy of being part of that group.