Voices of the Hills is a creative capacity-building initiative that aims to strengthen the storytelling skills of Indigenous youth from the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The project seeks to empower young people to document, preserve, and share their lived realities, cultural heritage, and community narratives through diverse and contemporary storytelling forms, while fostering pride, confidence, and creative leadership.
Objectives
- Strengthen storytelling skills among Indigenous youth
- Preserve and document Indigenous cultures, identities, and lived experiences
- Empower youth voices through creative, digital, and traditional storytelling tools
- Create platforms for cultural expression, dialogue, and community bonding
Project Summary
Voices of the Hills: Creative Storytelling Workshop is a three-day residential creative initiative designed to empower Indigenous youth from the Chittagong Hill Tracts to tell their own stories using powerful, contemporary, and culturally rooted storytelling methods. Indigenous communities in the hills have long faced marginalization and underrepresentation, resulting in the gradual loss of narratives that reflect their lived realities, cultural identities, and collective memory—particularly among younger generations.
As modernization and social exclusion continue to widen this gap, many Indigenous youth lack access to creative tools, mentorship, and safe spaces to express themselves. Voices of the Hills addresses this challenge by placing youth at the center of the storytelling process and equipping them with both traditional and digital storytelling skills.
Through hands-on learning in
- Illustration-based storytelling
- AI-based storytelling
- Literature-based storytelling
- Puppetry and performance
- Visual documentary
Participants explore diverse ways to articulate stories of identity, culture, struggle, hope, and belonging.
The workshop recognizes storytelling as a tool for cultural preservation, advocacy, and empowerment. By nurturing creative confidence and amplifying Indigenous voices, Voices of the Hills seeks to ensure that stories from the hills are preserved, shared, and told authentically by the communities themselves—strengthening cultural pride and fostering a new generation of Indigenous storytellers and changemakers.