When I packed for this two-day residency workshop, I thought of it as just another official engagement. However, the moment I stepped into aikyam space, I knew I was in for something different. I was welcomed by the happiest faces with roots and leaves. While Anjani gave me a tour of the space, my eyes were drawn to the the well-organised workspace and the tasteful collection of books. I got to meet some amazing individuals, aka ‘aikyam fellows’. Though I had been connected with most of them online for quite some time, getting to know them in person felt wonderful.
The motivation for attending this workshop was to introduce STEM Femme fellows of Citizen Digital Foundation to the world of storytelling through websites. The fellows will share their newly-acquired learning and skills to women from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, causing a ripple effect of growth. This gives the women a forward momentum to scale their home-grown micro-enterprises or earn through gig opportunities.
The STEM Femme fellowship, flagged off in January 2025, envisions bringing more women into the paid workforce through targeted digital skilling. The selected fellows—our changemakers—are resilient women who have worked their way through societal barriers to secure employment. They will lead by example for their participant cohort. aikyam fellows, as the knowledge partner of the STEM Femme fellowship, took the initiative to impart 'No code, low cost' website-building skills for our STEM Femmes.
On the first day of the residency, we had the first in-person meeting of the CDF STEM Femme fellowship team. Spending time with the STEM Femmes and witnessing their passion and commitment towards the project gave us a renewed sense of inspiration and energy.
As the session started, Sumi took us through various activities that conveyed different levels of impact storytelling: discoverability, visibility, engagement and impact. The empathy walk helped us connect instantly and underscored the need for active listening. The session was engaging and gave us insights into the different kinds of stakeholders for an organisation and its website.
We also had an interesting conversation with Sumi about finding balance, setting boundaries and the challenges of the glorified ‘working mums’ narrative—something beyond the scope of the workshop, but was relatable to our group.
The introduct0ry session to the Ghost platform by Megha helped the fellows get a grasp of this new tool easily. Our fellows, with absolutely zero background in coding, were able to come up with a product website in a week. We at CDF also got an impetus to set up our STEM Femme website, utilising the many tools and tricks learned under the aikyam residency. I gained a better understanding of how to effectively build a narrative and apply it to the CDF STEM Femme communication strategies.
Jinso introduced the group to a set of FOSS tools, curated by OASIS, including Bookstack, Plausible, Frappe, etc, that are essential for an enterprise to track and manage knowledge, analytics, ERP and CRM management.
Sumi Thomas
An engaging discussion with Shemeer emphasised the need for effective communication tools for engaging with stakeholders and scaling business. He explained the challenges of email and websites as a communication issue first, rather than a tech issue.
Insightful discussions, coupled with a comfy stay and homely food, created a serene experience! This two-day workshop did more than delve into the intricacies of storytelling; it provided a sense of belonging in its positive setting. This residency has equipped the team for problem-solving through understanding power-impact frameworks and marked our first step towards transforming home-based micro enterprises into discoverable entities.
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Glimpses from the two-day residency workshop
