For eighteen years, young people across India have used Youth Ki Awaaz to write about the lives they lead and the issues that shape them. When that writing is given a direction, through a programme built with a partner and a community, a narrative begins to form, and it is carried by the very people it is about.
Most narrative work has to begin by finding people willing to speak. Ours begins with a platform where young people are already writing, every day, about their towns, their families, their schools, their bodies and their work. In that sense, Youth Ki Awaaz has become India's largest narrative hub: the stories are already here, and our work is to give them direction.
A narrative is the story a society tells itself about an issue: who it affects, whose responsibility it is, and what a reasonable person does about it. It is rarely settled in a single moment. It settles through repetition in ordinary places, such as a conversation at home, a post shared in a college group or a question raised at a ward meeting, until one way of seeing the issue begins to feel like common sense.
This is why lived experience carries so much weight. When the person speaking has been through what they describe, the story has a specificity that no campaign brief can supply, and it reaches others through relationships they already trust. It is often also the clearest way into an issue that seems complicated from the outside, because people tend to describe an issue through the ordinary moments in which they meet it. Research on social norms has shown consistently that people change what they do when they see people like themselves changing.
A narrative built from many such voices does not depend on an outside messenger to stay alive. The community keeps returning to it, because it is their story, and that is what allows it to outlast the programme that began it.
Influencer partnerships and media coverage both have a real place in public communication, and we work alongside creators, journalists and communications teams often. They are very good at making an issue visible quickly. What they are not designed to do is keep that issue present in people's lives once a campaign period ends or the news cycle moves on.
Our work starts from a different question. Rather than asking who can carry a message to the largest audience this month, we ask who already lives with the issue, what they have to say about it, and what it would take for them to keep saying it. When young people and their communities become the storytellers and the culture shapers, an issue, an idea or a behaviour is seeded into daily life, and it comes back regularly because the people telling it are still there.
Reaches a wide audience quickly. The story is shaped by the brief and the creator, and attention usually follows the length of the engagement.
Brings credibility and a public moment. Attention tends to rise and settle with the news cycle, and the issue waits for its next moment.
Slower to build at first. Because the story belongs to the people living it, it keeps resurfacing in their conversations, and others begin to add their own.
India is one of the youngest countries in the world, but the case for young people as storytellers rests on more than their numbers.
Many of the choices that shape a life, about health, work, money, relationships and the city one lives in, are made between the ages of fifteen and thirty. A narrative that reaches people in these years shapes a great deal of what follows.
Young people move ideas between home and college, between the town they grew up in and the city they moved to, and between the generations in their own families. A story they tell rarely stays in one room.
Much of what circulates on phones across India, from music and memes to explainers and personal essays, is made by young people for one another. Working with that instinct is far more effective than working around it.
Decisions taken today on climate, public health and the design of our cities will play out across their lifetimes. That gives their voice a particular legitimacy in the rooms where those decisions are made.
We are community builders before we are storytellers, and the method follows that order. The specifics change with every partner, issue and place, but the sequence has held across more than a decade of programmes.
Every programme begins with understanding how young people currently see an issue, in their own words. We draw on our WhatsApp community across India's smaller towns, eighteen years of citizen writing, and conversations held on the ground where the work will happen.
TREND, our research and sensemaking unit, reads what we hear for patterns: where understanding is missing, where attitudes are already moving, and which framings resonate with whom. We pay close attention to the words communities use for an issue, and read them alongside lived experience and the ways gender, place, class and access change what the same issue means to different people. The simpler telling of a complex issue is usually already present in that language.
We build programmes that give communities the skills, structures and confidence to tell their own stories, through fellowships, writer cohorts, local campaigns, creative collaborations and civic dialogues. The young people involved decide what their stories say, and our role is to make sure they are well equipped to say it.
Because we run our own media and community properties, the stories that emerge do not depend on anyone else's editorial calendar. We publish and distribute them, and bring them into the rooms where decisions are made, alongside partners in media and government where that helps.
When people see others like them telling stories about an issue, a share of them begin to tell their own. Readers become writers, respondents become organisers, and the audience adds to the narrative instead of only receiving it. In our experience, this is the clearest sign that a narrative has taken hold, and it is also what feeds the next round of listening.
Each of these programmes began with a partner and an issue, and each followed the same sequence. The outcomes differ because the communities, the issues and the places did.
The programme began with a bilingual survey of more than 11,000 young people across 20 states on how they understood and experienced menstruation. Fifty-three writers, selected from 284 applicants, were trained to write about menstruation and social justice, and together with the wider community they published more than 500 stories. Over 150 young social entrepreneurs from 21 states were trained to run campaigns in their own communities, and more than ten of them went on to build their own organisations. Taken together, this work helped move the public conversation on menstruation away from taboo and shame and towards questions of product choice, affordability and policy, with young people, rather than institutions alone, setting the terms of that conversation.
Our 2019 survey of more than 5,200 young people found that only 6% identified fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change. Over the next four years, 45 climate correspondents from 19 states reported on how the crisis was showing up in their own regions, more than 1,200 citizen stories were published, and over 30 dialogues brought young people together with Members of Parliament, state environment secretaries and senior officials. At a time when climate was discussed in India mostly through extreme weather events, the campaign helped bring the net-zero transition and its fairness into the everyday conversation of young people, and established them as a constituency that decision makers expected to hear from on climate policy.
YouthACT, co-published with NIUA in 2024, is the first national framework in India that institutionalises young people in urban climate governance. ACT Indore brought it to a city: 50 fellows aged 14 to 24 surveyed more than a thousand households, designed community projects, and took their findings into policy consultations with the Indore Municipal Corporation. In a city where young people had largely been consulted on paper, if at all, the work has begun to shift how the city and its residents see them: as people who understand their neighbourhoods and can contribute to climate planning as a matter of course, rather than as a symbolic presence.
Save the Children India and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights had developed a procedure for how citizens should respond when they meet a child living on the street, but very few people knew it existed. We turned it into an interactive quiz that explained each provision in plain language. As tens of thousands of people took the quiz and more than 50 young readers wrote long-form pieces working through what they had learnt, the conversation moved from sympathy for street children towards a practical understanding of how to protect them, and it was sustained on the platform for over four years.
A multilingual climate rap mixtape made with six hip-hop artists working in regional languages. Climate change is usually discussed in the vocabulary of policy, and the mixtape allows it to be heard in the languages of the places where its effects are felt, through a form that young people already listen to and make themselves. In doing so, it treats climate as part of popular culture rather than a specialist subject, which is where a lasting narrative on any issue eventually has to live.
Antimicrobial resistance is usually explained in the language of laboratories. #SochSamajhKe began instead with the decisions people make about antibiotics every day, carried by three prompts: Ask First, Finish Fully and No Leftovers. Seventeen fellows, selected from 141 applicants, spent nine weeks listening in their own communities through four lenses: gender and care work, chemist-first healthcare in low-access areas, medicine culture in hostels and campuses, and habits passed between generations. Their interviews and 22 published stories kept returning to the same finding, that people often knew the right answer and still went straight to the chemist because it was faster, closer or cheaper. After receiving the campaign's content, 67% of respondents in our weekly polls said they were more likely to ask whether an antibiotic was actually needed. The conversation the campaign opened treats antibiotic misuse less as a failure of information and more as a question of trust, access and cost, and places resistance inside the family medicine cabinet rather than the laboratory.
The programme paired a national survey of 10,000 young people on socially and environmentally responsible consumption with a Sustainability Champions programme, in which young people in Assam, Delhi, Bangalore and Indore ran campaigns in their own communities. Their work ranged from food waste in college canteens in Jorhat to the hidden human costs of fast fashion and the jargon that keeps sustainability out of reach in Delhi. The survey found that 73% would buy more responsibly if people in their circle did, making peer influence the strongest lever it identified, and the findings were launched at UN House in New Delhi in October 2026. Together, the survey and the champions' campaigns help move sustainable consumption away from a vocabulary of individual guilt and corporate claims, and towards an everyday conversation among peers about price, trust and who bears the cost of what we buy.
We work with foundations, government institutions, multilateral agencies and civil society organisations. Every programme is designed together with the partner and the community it involves, and it begins, as our work always does, with listening.
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