Inspiring Stories – Freelance Writing Project

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.

We will also partner with colleges, schools and alumni networks to embed these
stories as case studies, either formally or informally, into curriculum or discussion
forums.

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. Inspiring 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.