Today, Youth Ki Awaaz turns 14. When I started the platform as a 17-year-old school student, I had never imagined that I would make this journey for 14 years.
In many ways, it’s a milestone.
Starting and sustaining in the media x tech landscape has been hard for many of us. The last two years in particular have probably been the most challenging. The silver lining in all of this has been the growing YKA community.
Earlier this year, Youth Ki Awaaz hit 130,000 writers on the platform, making it one of the largest writing platforms in the country. Hundreds and thousands of young people from across the country are now writing and speaking up on issues and topics that they deeply care about – putting us at the forefront of the pulse of young India.
Social justice issues have always been central to the writing on YKA. From my first article on global warming that launched YKA, the first-ever time someone wrote about menstrual hygiene on the platform, to the most-read posts on campus issues and access to education.
At the heart of it all has been the writer’s intent to change the world, and their belief that if they speak up, they can.
This Has Made Me Realise Something Critical
While we as humans are always going to seek information, it is the seeking of experiences and more personal stories that lead to a monumental impact on mindsets. That is what has fuelled and built YKA into what it is becoming today.
On YKA, you will find voices, experiences and stories on how climate change is impacting people’s health, what it means to champion a cause such as access to education, health and hygiene, stories of how Adivasi writers from across the country are building their own YKA-esque platforms to enable and empower each other.
You will find stories that are starting nationwide movements and dialogues, poetry that relates and inspires. And you will also find people coming together for campaigns that are creating a real impact on policies around us.
Stories, when told with passion are not just good to read, but also help the reader and writer imagine that we are all under the same roof, dealing with it together. And we shall overcome. They build empathy towards others. They build confidence that if we truly come together, we can build a better world.
Over the last 14 years, YKA has remained and will continue to be a multi-issue platform. We have also seen the platform influence and enable more young people to start their own platforms and organizations that focus on specific issues. Hence, we feel that in some way, issues that YKA alone talked about a decade ago are now being talked about and worked on by many others too. So we’re making a small change to the way we function.
In the last decade, we have focused on ensuring widespread issue representation on the platform. And while we will continue doing that, we will now focus on enabling wider demography of youth, building a more connected platform, and enhancing the YKA community even further.
Today, we have launched a new website to improve our community’s experience and ownership of the platform, and that isn’t even the first step towards this goal. Over the next few months, we will be expanding our platform to all the first time writers out there who have something to say but are not sure where to start. We will commit ourselves to doing justice to their voice and story – regardless of the topic they choose to write on.
We believe that YKA has done, and can do more to be the stepping stone for millions of young Indians. And as we grow, we will focus more on building this agency and confidence in young people to speak up, rather than focus on how they choose to speak up, or how polished their voice is.
Communication over grammar 🙂
To the Youth Ki Awaaz community – thank you for being here and standing by the platform for all these years. It’s time now to grow even more. Let’s bring more people to the platform, and make sure together, the Youth Ki Awaaz is bolder, stronger and louder than ever.