As our Founder and Inspiration, Urvashi Aunty, uses to say, “storytelling is key to my success”, and an indisputable leadership skill. The first edition of the Storytelling Slam intends to be a platform for the young people to work towards enabling their creativity and developing their writing by providing a public mirror to try public speaking and learn from others. At least the application to participate required a short video of maximum 5 minutes with the participant telling the story that would be reviewed and softly coached to its improvement, if needed.

The project was fully implemented by Study Hall College students guided by their teachers. The students were involved in the management of the event, getting a higher agency on their capabilities and being pushed to organize themselves and getting the know-how of digital marketing of the event promotion through social networks. It included a Web created ad-hoc for the event to both apply and get information. Therefore, the organizers had to acquire the organisational and technical skills necessary to develop a real life project with requirements and deadlines and the responsibility to bring it to completion with as high quality as possible within their limits.

The project plan required setting tasks, milestones, roles and resources as well as promotion of the same and opening of a call for the students to submit their stories, judgement of the stories according to an agreed set of rules and finally moderation and launch of the show. Digital certificates were designed, generated and distributed to all applicants.

The show of the event included a famous guest, the renowned storyteller Dastango Himanshu Bajpai. More than 70 students participated in submitting their stories in short videos, which had to be reduced to a fair representation of different ages and units of 8 stories. They were told, when possible, live by their authors or with the submitted videos.

All in all the event resulted in a noticeable empowerment of the students involved in the organization and a beautiful collaborative experience of a big part of SHEF.