Dignity Fellowship, Central India, 2022-25
• Fellowship Duration: 1 year (2023–2024)
• Focus: Deepening and living the values of the Indian Constitution — dignity, justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity
• Role: Co-facilitator, learner, and space-holder
Key Contributions
• Co-facilitated emotional resilience and leadership workshops across India
• Held dialogue circles on power, patriarchy, vulnerability, and collective healing
• Supported fellows in reflecting on their inner contradictions and social locations
• Brought in lived experience from education, community work, and systemic inquiry
Core Practices
• Inner work: exploring masculinity, inherited power, emotional literacy
• Systemic reflection: reframing democracy as relationship and dignity as a daily ethic
• Community learning: Participatory processes rooted in empathy, listening, and co-creation
Reach & Impact
• Engaged with 30+ fellows across diverse regions and contexts
• Helped co-create safe, reflective spaces for personal and collective transformation
• Deepened commitment to ethical leadership and interbeing-centered change
After years of working across communities, movements, and alternative learning spaces, I found myself returning to a quieter, more inward question:
What does dignity truly mean, not as a concept, but as a daily lived practice?
The Dignity Fellowship became a space where I could hold this question, not just intellectually, but relationally and somatically. Over the course of a year, I immersed myself in the lived values of the Indian Constitution — justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, and dignity — not through legal texts, but through relationships, facilitation, self-inquiry, and collective healing.
I co-facilitated circles with other fellows across geographies, creating safe spaces where young changemakers could explore emotional resilience, systemic awareness, inner contradictions, and alternative leadership practices.
We engaged deeply with power and patriarchy, not as external systems alone, but as internalized structures we carry within, in families, organizations, and our own nervous systems.
For me, this fellowship became a turning point, where my earlier inquiries around sustainability, community, and interbeing converged with the ethical and emotional depth of constitutional imagination. I revisited old wounds, particularly around masculinity, authority, and inherited power, working to unlearn patterns that no longer served the collective future I wished to participate in.
The Dignity Fellowship taught me that transformation cannot be outsourced.
It must be practiced, slowly, vulnerably, and in relationship.
That democracy is not just a political structure, but a way of relating.
And that dignity begins when we learn to see each other, and ourselves, with wholeness, complexity, and care.