A new fellowship that reimagines conservation in Northeast India

For galore years, Sameer Gurung, who grew up successful the colony of Mangzing successful Sikkim, did not realise that conservation was thing that helium could bash himself. “I would conscionable perceive astir it successful papers and different media,” helium says. Then, successful 2024, helium came crossed and got selected for a liable tourism store offered by the Green Hub Project, a North East-focused inaugural that engages and empowers younker successful conservation enactment and societal change.

“That is wherever I got to cognize much astir the conservation efforts happening successful the North East, and I got inclined towards biodiversity conservation,” says Sameer, who began utilizing creation and storytelling to thrust his conservation efforts. “I would similar to find projects, funding, and grants done which I tin enactment and instrumentality guardant conservation with my art.”

It was to further these goals that Sameer successfully applied for the Future Full of Forests Fellowship, a caller programme offered by the Canopy Collective, which brings unneurotic researchers, artists, section communities, and grassroots leaders to reimagine wildlife conservation successful the North East. The fellowship, which has been supported by the Coexistence Consortium, Duleep Matthai Nature Conservation Foundation and a big of different organisations, “aims to enactment young community-based practitioners with grooming successful task management, communication, and storytelling,” explains wildlife biologist Nandini Velho, laminitis and task pb astatine Canopy Collective, who has been instrumental successful processing this programme.

The Fellowship was motivated by absorption radical discussions conducted by Nandini and her colleague, Sayan Banerjee, with on-the-ground conservation practitioners. It recovered that, crossed the North East and different parts of India, these practitioners play a captious relation successful protecting forests, wildlife, and assemblage landscapes, bringing beardown place-based cognition and deep-rooted discourse to their work. But they often deficiency structured enactment systems to transportation retired their enactment meaningfully.

“We person been moving with practitioners for much than a decade, and I besides person a probe background, truthful I americium acquainted with the assemblage and organization frameworks,” says Nandini, who believes that determination is simply a large spread successful entree erstwhile it comes to definite learning tools and levels of practice. “I don’t deliberation that the strategy we presently person allows for this on-ground tract signifier for everybody,” says Nandini.

One contented that came up, for instance, is that portion these practitioners recognize their landscapes well, they conflict to pass their learnings. They are often constrained by a deficiency of skills successful areas specified arsenic connection penning and task management, which successful crook limits their quality to unafraid backing and prolong their initiatives.

“They (conservation practitioners) said that they often felt underconfident and would similar further grooming to beryllium capable to archer their ain stories, springiness a presumption oregon constitute an article,” says Nandini

Another captious contented these conservationists raised was a spread successful knowing betwixt section cognition and its narration to well-established ecological theory. “Most grassroots and on-ground conservationists we spoke to knew their forests intimately. But galore expressed a tendency to link that lived cognition with technological frameworks to recognize however their observations acceptable into bigger ecological stories,” explains Nandini.

The fellowship, which sought to code these concerns, was rolled retired successful February this twelvemonth and volition culminate connected May 17, erstwhile Sameer and 19 different fellows volition officially postgraduate astatine a ceremonial during the Green Hub Festival 2026 successful Tezpur.

The fellowship, she says, was dispersed crossed 3 phases, and “between the phases, we besides had mentors coming along, truthful it was a continuous process, and determination were definite milestones that the fellows had to implicit during the fellowship.”

Some of the different fellows from this archetypal cohort see Shaleena Phinya from Singchung, Lipok Jamir from Nagaland, Lucky Changmail from Dibrugarh and Binita Deka from Jorhat, each of whom person contributed to the conservation communicative of their States successful antithetic ways.

”I learnt galore things from this fellowship,” says Shaleena, a filmmaker and subordinate of the assemblage patrol unit astatine the Singchung Bugun Village Community Reserve successful Arunachal Pradesh, listing her cardinal takeaways from the fellowship, which see connection drafting and storytelling. “All this was caller to me, arsenic we don’t person things similar this successful our village. It has been a bully acquisition truthful far.”

The anticipation now, says Nandini, is that the fellows volition permission with a “renewed consciousness of assurance and knowing that determination is enactment and a satellite retired determination that cares precise profoundly astir the enactment they do. I privation them to realise that the enactment that they bash and the experiences that they person are the mode forward.”

To cognize much astir the fellowship, email communications@canopycollective.in