Introduction: America, like the Sikh tradition, is ultimately an experiment in pluralism. In this essay, I reflect on the upcoming Sikh festival of Vaisakhi (April 13/14), the lessons my mother taught me, the image of a young boy kneeling in service, and my own journey to citizenship. Writing as a Sikh American, immigrant, and storyteller for peace and justice, I explore what it means to carry this responsibility into the evolving story of this nation, and how traditions of service can help us nurture empathy, belonging, and the shared work of advancing pluralism and multiculturalism, as core American values.

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Every spring, Sikhs around the world celebrate Vaisakhi.

It is one of the most important days in the Sikh calendar, marking the birth and remembrance of the Khalsa in 1699, when the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, called upon Sikhs to commit themselves to a life of courage, service, and equality.

In gurdwaras, which are Sikh temples, the saffron-orange Nishan Sahib flag is lowered from its tall pole and washed with milk as part of a ritual cleansing. A fresh cloth is wrapped around it before it is raised again, symbolizing renewal. Communities gather for parades honoring the Panj Pyare—the Five Beloved Ones, followed by music, food, and celebration.

But my earliest memory of Vaisakhi was actually a lesson taught to me by my mother.

I must have been eight or nine years old. My family and I were visiting a gurdwara in West London, where many members of the Sikh diaspora gathered. As always, we removed our shoes before entering and placed them among the hundreds lining the racks near the entrance.

Usually, we would go upstairs to sit in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh scripture we regard as a living teacher. Worshippers bow their heads, sit in meditation, and listen to shabads, spiritual hymns whose poetic verses form the heart of Sikh scripture.

But on this particular day, my mother stopped me.

Instead of going upstairs, she handed me a cloth and asked me to clean the shoes of the worshippers. At first, I thought I was being punished. But what she was teaching me was seva—service to others, which in Sikhism is considered one of the highest forms of prayer. To kneel down and clean the shoes of strangers is an act of humility. It reminds us that dignity belongs to everyone. That no task is beneath us. That service connects us to one another and to something greater than ourselves. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but the lesson stayed with me. And in many ways, it has shaped my life.

I come from the Sikh tradition, the world’s fifth-largest religion, yet one that is often misunderstood, both in the West and sometimes even in India, where the faith originated. Growing up in England in the 1980s and 1990s, my father wore a traditional Sikh turban. Strangers would sometimes accuse him on the street of being a terrorist. For much of my life, that word has been used against Sikhs as a racial slur, sometimes out of hate, but often out of ignorance and fear. After the attacks of September 11, those misunderstandings intensified dramatically.

Religious scholar Simran Jeet Singh writes powerfully about this in The Light We Give. A Sikh with Punjabi roots who was born and raised in Texas, Jeet Singh has also experienced being called a terrorist because he wears a turban. He often points out the irony behind one of the insults directed at him: “Go back to where you came from.” If he were to do that, he says, he would go back to Texas.

In some ways, I grew up with a similar irony.

I was raised in Eastbourne, England, right on the coast, about fifty miles south of London. On a clear day, you could see France across the channel. Like most kids, I spent my days riding my bicycle, climbing trees, and exploring the neighborhood. But I was also a kid who stood out.

My family had come to Britain in 1972, as refugees, escaping war and persecution in Uganda during the era of Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Four years later, I was the first person of color, as far as I know, born in the small English town where I grew up. There was racial violence directed toward immigrants across the UK at the time, fueled in part by the racist rhetoric of British politician Enoch Powell. Some days, that violence spilled into our small town. Led not by politicians in suits, but by young men wearing green bomber jackets, DM boots with white laces, and union jack tattoos on their arms.

One of those neo-Nazis knocked me from my BMX bike when I was five years old. I still carry twenty-six stitches on my face from that attack and others. I’ve been beaten up so many times I’ve lost count. Once, my head was stomped so badly that I woke up in a hospital. On the playground, I was bullied and called names, “smelly immigrant,” “curry boy.” Kids would shout, “Go back to where you came from!”

So I did. I ran straight across the street to our house, the only place I knew.

My mother was my primary teacher. She was an artist and a registered nurse. I remember her white Florence Nightingale–style uniform and the upside-down watch pinned to her chest so she could read it while taking a patient’s pulse. I looked up to her in so many ways.

Around our kitchen table, and as she cooked, she would tell me stories to help me make sense of what often felt like a chaotic and violent world. She told me about my grandparents, freedom fighters in India who came from rural villages of farmers and carpenters who challenged and eventually helped dismantle imperial British rule. She told me about their life in East Africa, how my grandfather, with his own hands, built a water well, so passersby could drink fresh, clean water in the scorching heat, and how my grandmother won a red chili–eating competition and used the prize money to buy a weaving loom to support the family. She told me stories of courage, determination, and love, stories of activists and freedom warriors. Those stories helped me imagine a bigger world and a bigger version of myself. Then she would say to me, “Now go back onto that playground and tell them who you really are.”

I did. And it helped.

Even in India, Sikhs are a minority who have faced violence and persecution. There are many ironies embedded in these misunderstandings. One of the greatest is this: Sikhism is built on principles of equality, justice, and unconditional love for humanity, even for those who might wrong us.

In many ways, Sikhs were among the earliest social justice advocates. Our tradition teaches respect for all faiths, service to community, protection of the oppressed, and the recognition that every human being carries divine dignity. Many Sikhs wear the turban, as a crown, and also so they can be spotted in a crowd and can be called upon to help, regardless of their faith, background, or political affiliation.  

When I was a child, my mother introduced me to something she called the Journey of Five. The idea was simple: encounter and learn from five spiritual or cultural traditions different from your own. Only after listening deeply to others, participating in their customs and traditions, could you truly understand what it meant to be a Sikh.

Our journey took us many places: midnight Mass at a church, visits to mosques, synagogues, and Hindu temples, and conversations about faith and belonging. For most of my life, I assumed this teaching came from Sikh scripture. Only later did I realize it was my mother’s own interpretation of Sikh values. But in many ways, that is exactly how living traditions work. They adapt and evolve. To my mother, curiosity was sacred, and humility was the path to wisdom.

Some of my earliest memories of Sikh values also come from visits to Punjab, where my extended family lived in rural villages known as pinds. When I visited as a child, my mother took me to one of our ancestral villages in the lush green fields of northern India. There were no curfews, and what felt like no rules or schedules. It felt like the whole village gathered in one house, with many things happening at once. Some people sat on cushions watching a six-hour Bollywood movie. Kids played on the veranda. Older women led folk songs while tapping rhythm on a tolki drum with a metal spoon. It was less about watching the movie than about just being together.

While we were in India, my mother also took me to the most famous langar in the world- Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, better known as the Golden Temple. The temple sits in the middle of a vast pool of water, surrounded by marble. Visitors cross a bridge to reach it. The building has four doors, symbolizing openness to people from every direction. It was built low to the ground to express humility to Earth and nature. Tradition even holds that the first brick was laid by a Muslim. Like all Sikh gurdwaras, it is built around a langar, a community kitchen that serves free vegetarian meals made by volunteers, to anyone who walks through the door. Every day, around fifty thousand people are fed there.

When I first visited as a six-year-old, my mother and I sat cross-legged on the floor alongside people from every walk of life—rich and poor, men and women, people of every religion, color, and ability, serving one another and sharing a meal as equals. I never forgot that. Especially in India, where the caste system sees entire swaths of people as “untouchables,” not even worthy to eat food with. Eating at the Golden Temple didn’t just feel good, it was a political act, quietly revolutionary, breaking down centuries of social hierarchy, one meal at a time.

Back in England, my mother had her own version of langar. One of my most vivid childhood memories begins with her voice ringing out the front door of our small concrete house on Chaffinch Road:

“Tea’s ready, boys!”

I would come downstairs to find ten burly men crowded into our kitchen; their trucks parked four-deep on the cul-de-sac. They were laughing with my mom, telling stories, connecting. They were the neighborhood garbage collectors. And as they made their rounds, our house had become their favorite stop. Morning tea at the Sirah household meant English tea in my mother’s best cups and British biscuits shared around the kitchen table. Sometimes there were so many of them that they spilled into the garden.

Why does this memory stay with me?

Partly because the image is so vivid. But mostly because of what it taught me: that dignity and love belong to everyone. No exceptions.

From our tiny kitchen on a dead-end street in southern England, my mother was doing her part to build a fairer society, in the simplest way she knew how, by making tea, sharing food, and inviting people to tell their stories. She instilled in me the Sikh values of nirbhau (no fear) and nirvair (no hate). She taught me persistence (sangarsh), a commitment to truth (sach), and the importance of chardi kala, maintaining an optimistic spirit even in the face of adversity.

What I observed in her actions became the blueprint for my life.

It’s a lesson I’ve tried to carry into all my work, from helping multifaith communities, especially Muslim and Jewish communities, grapple with tensions since 9/11 and the conflicts that have followed, to using arts, music, storytelling, museum exhibits, and other folklife approaches to address historical sectarian divides in Northern Ireland and the west of Scotland.

Fifteen years ago, when I came to the United States on a Rotary Peace Fellowship at the University of North Carolina, activist folklorist and teacher, Dr. Elaine Lawless, taught me to see these values, along with my status as a new immigrant and a person of color with a British accent as both an opportunity and a responsibility. She encouraged me to pay attention to communities struggling for justice, to listen for untold stories, and to use my art and experiences, to create space for conversations about the issues we, as a nation, need to face.

I took that call to heart and made it central to everything I do.

Since then, I have led an institution, the International Storytelling Center in Tennessee, for a decade, curated America’s National Storytelling Festival, and facilitated both small and large community dialogues through this socially engaged lens. I’ve witnessed people, young and old, across political and cultural backgrounds, come alive, gain agency, speak in their own voices, and feel empowered to make change. Not by imposing my story or my values, but by cultivating spaces where people feel comfortable, sometimes even vulnerable enough, to discover and share their own. As a folklorist, artist, peacebuilder, and as a Sikh, I’ve come to see storytelling, as a sacred communal art, with a profound sense of responsibility. An ancestral teaching, yet highly relevant for our modern world.

When I first moved to East Tennessee, I arrived in a place where I didn’t know a single person. It was daunting. But I remembered my mother’s lessons.

In the American South, joining a church is often one way to find community. But there were no Sikh gurdwaras where I live, and very few Sikh people. I found comfort in remembering that, in Sikhism, we often regard every place of worship as a Sikh place of worship, spaces where we can learn and be in community. Despite differences in tradition and belief, there is a sense that something larger binds us all. So, as new friendships began to form, I started inviting people onto my front porch and into my living room. Together, we talked about the social justice issues we cared about. It felt important to bring those conversations into spaces of safe, inclusive, everyday ritual.

I began inviting the world into my home, and in turn, I used my home and the resources I had most access to, to celebrate world traditions with my neighbors. We observed Muslim Iftar during Ramadan. We marked Christian Easter. One year, a Jewish friend and I realized that Peseach, Jewish Passover and Sikh Vaisakhi fell at the same time, so we organized a gathering we called “Peseach-khi.” We made masala matzah balls and tandoori latke cakes, invited neighbors and friends, and shared the stories of Exodus alongside Sikh stories of liberation and freedom, along with the poetry of Audre Lorde and bell hooks. Later that year, during Hanukkah, I found a menorah at a local Target and, with the guidance of a rabbi friend, invited Episcopalian friends over to light the candles and say the prayers.

Storytelling is powerful on stages and under festival tents, but the stories we share in small, intimate spaces, around kitchen tables, on front porches, in neighborhood cafés, may be even more so. These are the spaces where we can meet each other with curiosity, humility, and wisdom.

Since I had moved to this region to lead a nonprofit institution, one of my first professional tasks was to go out and meet the community. Here I was, once again, the new guy in town, a Brown European liberal in a predominantly white conservative region. I thought to myself, how’s this going to work? I met a man for coffee. He was a self-made philanthropist and a highly influential figure in the region, but the first thing he did was ask me for my story, so I told him about my upbringing, my parents fleeing Uganda. He smiled. He went on to tell me that not many people knew this, but during that time, he had been a cargo plane pilot delivering food and supplies to refugees fleeing across the Ugandan border into Kenya.

I was stunned.
 
That’s what you might call Southern hospitality. Here I was, sitting with someone who had helped my people thousands of miles away, before I was even born. I got to shake the hand of a man who already knew my story and was already part of it, and I would not have known if not for meeting him in person.
 
But this chance encounter was something deeper. A reminder that strangers can be connected in ways we don’t yet understand. A reminder of something my mother taught me: when we create space to truly share who we are and where we come from, we can discover unexpected threads that bind us together, moments that may occur years from now, even generations to come. And what I’ve come to believe is that if we really believe in healthy discourse and dialogue, we’ve got to be willing to face the discomfort. We cannot be afraid.
 
Today, the United States, is in the midst of an identity crisis. The painful legacies of our past, the Civil War, slavery, Jim Crow, it’s always been there, beneath the surface. It may feel like it’s bubbling over at the moment, but how do you see this particular moment in history? Is it horrifying? Sad? Dangerous in its uncertainty? All those things may be true, but I also see it as an opportunity. Some of the greatest moments in human history come from a collapse or an upheaval, which often sprout movements that advance far beyond what we previously knew.
 
But we know turmoil or new movements doesn’t just spring up overnight- the past is always informing the present. Around 2017, I attended a talk by Dr. Bernice King, the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., just a few blocks from my home in Johnson City. She said something that has stayed with me:
 
“There’s something Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump have in common: both have woken this country up to the great disparities that already exist.”
 
Regardless of political belief, when I share this reflection, people often find themselves nodding in recognition. We need ways to understand how the past informs the present. And we need spaces where everyday people can recognize their own power, to shift culture, to make small but meaningful changes, and to engage in conversations that help us imagine a different kind of world. One that is more just, more humane, and more connected than the one we are living in now.

Today, I try to build the same kind of home my mother built. A few years ago, before a Black Lives Matter rally in my town, I invited five people to dinner: two activists organizing the protest, the town’s Republican mayor, an African American minister, and myself. I spent the day cooking Punjabi curry. When everyone arrived, I said, “Before we talk politics, we’re going to break bread.” As we ate, the tension softened. People told their stories. They listened. And when the rally came, the mayor not only attended, but he also helped ensure that police protected protesters from white supremacist groups that had come to provoke violence.

That evening reminded me of something my mother understood instinctively: conversation changes when people sit together as equals. Sometimes, all it takes is a kitchen table.

My work has required a lot of travel across this nation, and I’m grateful for that. Over the years, I’ve set foot in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and in the Mississippi River. I walked for three days and nights on the Appalachian Trail. I once sat in a New York City Lower East Side café lit by candlelight after Hurricane Sandy, and the next day walked to the United Nations, to share a poem, on the International Day of Peace, and I’ve been sent a bouquet of flowers by Dolly Parton, as a gesture of thanks for training her team of literacy educators through her Imagination Library project.

I’ve been invited to Charleston, South Carolina, following the 2015 massacre at Mother Emanuel Church that took nine lives. There, in honor of Cynthia Hurd, one of the victims, I led a workshop at an inner-city high school to help students make sense of their own stories and identify how they relate to what was happening in their city and the world around them. It was also impossible to ignore how close we were to the port that served as the point of entry for nearly half of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States. There was a palpable connection between that history and the tragedy that had just taken place. 

What I’ve observed through these experiences is, as a diverse nation, as complex as any other I have lived in or visited, the United States is very much a story in progress. It is vibrant and multifaceted, but it also contains deep flaws that are holding us back from becoming all that we might be.
I’ve witnessed this tension firsthand. I happened to be in Baton Rouge when Alton Sterling was killed. And I’ve been here through the reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, watching peaceful candlelight vigils take place alongside the troubling rise of white supremacist violence.

Across the country, we are still grappling with the legacies of slavery and the Civil War. These histories are not so distant. We still need spaces for reflection and dialogue as we reckon with them. And even as we try to come to terms with the past, the present continues to bring new challenges.

In recent years, my life has gone through another transformation. I became a United States citizen. I was able to vote for the first time in a national election. While the result was not how I’d hope it would turn out, as a Sikh American, this has only deepened my sense of purpose and responsibility to learn from people with different beliefs, perspectives, and ways of life beyond my own. I’ve found myself devoting more of myself to this pluralistic endeavor through an artistic, socially engaged practice, rooted in Sikh and activist principles of understanding and revealing the essence of our shared humanity.

My mother’s stage was our small family home. I have tried to carry that spirit into a communal art and form of work that is both portable and can be shared. Something that can move across communities, disciplines, and social movements. While my work has taken me across the country, from the halls of the United Nations, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the US Senate advocating for bi-partisan peace policies, to helping Appalachian communities discuss what to do with their confederate monuments, to classrooms and churches in towns across America, all in an effort to hold safe and intimate spaces where vulnerability is welcomed, and where shared dialogue can open pathways toward deeper understanding.

It has now been fifteen years since I first got my visa approved at the U.S. embassy in London, for what was meant to be a two-year course of study. There’s no question I’ve had incredible experiences with remarkable people. But lately, I’ve been asking myself: what have I come to understand about the Journey of Five, Vaisakhi, my upbringing, and moving to the United States in this time?

Growing up, it was sometimes hard to be different. There are people in the world who teach that difference should be feared, not celebrated. But from an early age, I came to understand that diversity is not something to fear, it is something to value. Discrimination against people is wrong. But discriminating between people, looking at how we are all different and belong to unique stories, is crucial. Recognizing this is the best way to develop a world based on mutual respect and understanding. If we imagine a garden with only one kind of flower, or a forest with only one kind of bird, it feels incomplete. It takes difference to make something whole. It may sound romantic, but in many ways, that idea is foundational to the United States, a country shaped by immigrants, by many stories coming together.

I live and call this country my home today, but the first time I came to America, I was twelve years old. My brother was sixteen. My parents had saved for years for one of those classic American vacations. We went to Disney World and had our picture taken with Mickey Mouse. We visited SeaWorld and met baby Shamu. And of course, we went to New York City, where my father took us to see the Statue of Liberty. My mom and brother stayed at the bottom, but my dad and I took an elevator halfway up and then climbed the rest of the way toward the crown. It was a long climb for a kid. When we finally reached the window, we looked out over America… and realized we had left the camera at the bottom with my mom. This was before cell phones.

But we were fortunate, a kind Chinese American man, an immigrant, offered to take a photo with his own camera and send it to us. Weeks later, after we had returned to the UK, that photograph arrived in the mail. I’ve always remembered that person’s kindness and the effort he made for a family he would never see again.

I think of the hospitality and kindness I’ve witnessed across the vast majority of people and places, in all directions of this nation. I think of the way people welcome one another with curiosity and generosity, the dinners and potlucks, the cenas Americanas. How people have, for decades, brought their traditions and stories from all over the world into one shared space. I see this kind of communion as one of this nation’s greatest strengths. Something that I can see people are striving to cultivate further, as a collective cultural superpower.  

In Sikhism, the tenth Guru asked all Sikhs to recognize the entire human race as one. When we meet others, we are called to remember that we are human first. Becoming a United States citizen deepened my sense of responsibility to this idea, to contribute to this country’s ongoing story. Because America, like the Sikh tradition, is ultimately an experiment in pluralism. Its strength lies in the diversity of voices that shape it, inviting empathy where there might otherwise be fear.

For me, exploring the truth and meaning within other people’s beliefs, and how people create meaning in their lives, whether rooted in faith or not, continues to be an essential part of my own journey, learning about different lives and worldviews.

The Journey of Five was never only about religion. It was about vulnerability, about stepping into other people’s lives and ways of seeing the world. I no longer feel like an outsider observing from a distance. I understand now that I am part of this nation’s story, as an immigrant, as a new Appalachian, as a new Sikh American, connected also to a broader world.

Vaisakhi marks the arrival of spring for Sikhs, but it is also a season of renewal, harvest, and new beginnings for many. A time to imagine the future we want to help build. A time to renew the values, people, and traditions that have guided our lives, whether they come from faith, family, culture, scripture, lived experience, constitutional or civil rights, or the places we call home.

History shows us that moments of turmoil can give rise to transformation. Stories of struggle can become stories of hope. They can activate the storyteller in all of us, drawing us to the most powerful place we have to build community, challenge inequality, and imagine the story we wish to live into as a nation, and how that story shapes our relationship with the wider world. As we gather around our kitchen tables.
 
Storytelling teaches us to listen and to listen in new ways. A society that listens, that bears witness to multiple stories—the sorrow, the pain, and also the joy—creates a culture rooted in empathy, love, and kindness. These connections become the foundation for building repair, healing, and the possibility for positive change. Storytelling is humanity’s most accessible, truly democratic art and social force for social change.
 
People often ask me what the “formula” is for "compelling storytelling." I’m not sure there is one, but if there were, perhaps it’s this: think about what you care about most, values you feel are worth lifting, even if some larger powers are trying to silence them. Tell a story and your truth about it. And if that story moves your heart, chances are it will move the hearts of others, too.
 
Today, when people ask me about my storytelling methods, I don’t point to a PowerPoint or a scientific formula. I tell them about my mother. I share my experiences of where I come from, as well as the nation I have chosen to call home, a nation that is made up of millions of stories, heartbreaking, poignant, complicated, infuriating, and fascinating narratives that go far beyond soundbites on the news. The kind of stories that come from personal contact.

I think about the lessons from strangers, from everyday encounters. The Journey of Five, as something that can be scaled up, down, and out across this nation, as I move deeper into the place I call home. Especially when it feels like things are so large and overwhelming, it’s something I know I can turn to.

I think about a small kitchen in England. I remember, Tea and biscuits.

I remember garbage collectors gathered around a table.
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And, I remember a boy kneeling to clean strangers’ shoes on Vaisakhi.
 
 By Kiran Singh Sirah

 
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​In June 2025, I received a Creative Liberation Fellowship through Waymakers Collective’s Appalachian Arts and Culture Assembly, which was an opportunity that offered something rare for a working creative practitioner: time. It gave me time to reflect, to revisit earlier methods, and to experiment with new approaches in my Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, liberation-focused storytelling practice centered on healing, dialogue, community transformation.

My work for decades has been about harnessing the art of storytelling to create intimate healing and justice spaces that build dialogue, agency, and change for communities on their own terms. While this initiative builds on that lived and researched folklife practice, leveraging stories as humanity’s birthright to help build a socially just present and future, this fellowship gave me the space to slow down for some months, some of my less busy months over the winter season, and spend time deepening the work and projects for the new year.

I spent time refining workshops, expanded toolkits, and piloted new methods across multiple settings, with the intention of helping activist artists, cultural workers, and community leaders respond to the challenges we’re all facing, telling our nation’s stories truthfully, more inclusively and positioning ethical and communal storytelling as central to shaping a fuller civic identity.

My work as a folklorist and storytelling artist has always centered on creating spaces where stories can surface, spaces that support healing, understanding, and transformation. I’ve witnessed how ethically applied and communal storytelling helps people respond to crisis, process trauma, and transform narratives of fear into stories of power and change. But more than anything, with this fellowship time, I got to sit with these ideas and explore questions that felt urgent in this moment and begin shaping new storytelling futurism approaches cultivated in imagination, intersectionality, and collective liberation. I spent time revamping story circle formats for deeper intersectional dialogues that felt safer and relevant to the moment.
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Stories belong to everyone, but it doesn’t always feel that way. Across Appalachia, and across much of this country, communities are living through deep uncertainty. For many, particularly BIPOC, immigrant, LGBTQIA+, working-class, and disability justice communities, fear and isolation feel very real, along with the systemic and intentional silencing of our stories, when we know these are the very stories society needs to hear. For me, this fellowship became an invitation to explore a guiding question: How do we cultivate our stories to meet this tumultuous moment?

I was able to focus on strengthening and expanding a series of projects and creative practices, including a previous Appalachian residency, Stories from the Front Porch, as well as develop a new The Storyteller’s Artist Palette and The Story of the Future exercise. I got to test these in various community spaces. Some of these activities were implemented through a socially engaged storytelling initiative called Gather ’Round the Table. While this work took place in Iowa, it gave me time to trial these ideas in a bridge-building-across-difference project before bringing the ideas back to my home region. That project involved youth, elders, immigrant families, veterans, civic leaders, and artists, through storytelling and listening spaces that included talk-back public dialogues, intergenerational story walks, creative writing sessions, and family porch-style storytelling gatherings.

I also continued developing my own tools and strategies, which helped people visualize their stories in new ways. One of the most meaningful methods to emerge was what I came to call The Storyteller’s Artist Palette. This activity invites participants into a narrative mediation process, where they could visually map memories and connect them to personal values and experiences. These mapped memories, somewhat like small story vignettes, give participants a chance to weave them into intersectional conversations and place-based advocacy storytelling, as well as something they can physically take with them to develop further.

Another method that grew from this period of reflection was the Story of the Future activity. I developed this in the context of the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States founding. As this milestone has become part of national discourse, I wanted to intentionally create an activity that ensured communities like ours were part of these dialogues, exploring what it means to be American, connected to this nation, and what issues and ideals we feel have been met, or are still yet to be realized, based on our own truths, that we hold to be self-evident. Not from the position of institutions, but from us as individuals, activists, and small intersectional collectives.

In this work, through two piloted events, participants were invited to imagine futures in which belonging and justice could be envisioned without barriers. In one version of the activity, I drew from my work in museums and invited participants (special education and disability rights advocates) to imagine and design a hypothetical museum, a Museum of National Disability Rights. In another, with Appalachian practitioners, an Appalachian Museum of Liberty, Truth, and Justice.
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Here, groups wove personal stories alongside cultural narratives they felt were important to make visible. The exercise also prompted questions about whose voices had been missing, what stories deserved to be preserved or disrupted, and what future generations might need to understand about this current moment in history. The exercise was essentially about developing collective storytelling, identifying what intersectional threads felt important to the group as a whole, and, in the practice of telling, what reflections could become actual storytelling possibilities.

All of this work eventually, in February 2026, led to a culminating regional convening titled Storytelling, Futurism & Liberation: Cultivating Our Stories to Meet This Moment. Around 16 artist-activists, educators, organizers, and cultural workers traveled from across Central Appalachia to take part. Preparation began weeks in advance, with reflective applications that helped shape how I developed the workshop design and identify shared concerns. These included rising authoritarianism, harm to marginalized communities, the need for solidarity, and the desire to preserve distinct cultural stories that currently feel under threat.

The gathering was intentional as a family-style storytelling space. Local Johnson City non-profit, Philosopher’s tea house provided the space. Together, we began with introductions, moved through story circles, narrative mapping, creative writing, and collaborative futurism exercises. Participants worked together to imagine their own museum exhibits representing liberation narratives in justice, belonging, and hope for their region, and the homes, issues, and causes they felt were important to include.

A participant shared her words that sums up what this gathering meant.

"Spaces where the soul can be nourished are rare. For a moment, we stepped away from the chaos and imagined something restorative."

Looking back on this fellowship year, I feel deep gratitude for the time it created. I’ve long believed storytelling is a slow art form, something that requires patience in order to do justice to the story that needs to be told in all its complexity. The fellowship gave me permission to experiment, take risks, and grow creatively, to put some of my ideas into direct practice. It also gave me time to deepen my commitment to supporting communities in shaping their own narratives on their own terms.

Since receiving this fellowship earlier this year, I was inducted into the AppalCore governing body for the Waymakers Collective. As such, I feel excited to bring what I learned from the fellowship into the practice of moving our collective work forward for the benefit of all the Appalachian communities we serve. In addition to supporting my own independent work through Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, wherever I’m called or invited to help.

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As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, a longtime friend and partner, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (SCFCH), is taking one of its most beloved public traditions, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, on the road. Through Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals, this national initiative is traveling beyond Washington, D.C., into communities across the country and U.S. territories, joining local festivals and gatherings that already serve as vibrant spaces of culture, exchange, and belonging.

This effort recognizes something I have long believed in my own work as a storyteller, folklorist, and peacebuilder, that festivals are more than celebrations, they are places where culture is lived and can be shared. They are spaces where people come together to listen, to witness, and to imagine what is possible together. Across the months between March and November, the Festival of Festivals will collaborate with gatherings of all sizes, from community music festivals to neighborhood celebrations, amplifying the stories, and traditions that continue to shape civic life in America.

For much of my life, I have worked at the intersections of storytelling, cultural practice, and community dialogue. I have seen how the artistry of communal storytelling can support the exchange of stories between people of different walks of life, especially those whose experiences have often been marginalized or pushed to the edges of public conversation. When people gather to tell stories, across differences of background, belief, language, or lived experience, they create space for empathy, invite reflection, help people see one another as neighbors with histories, values, hopes and dreams.

At its heart, storytelling is about the desire to feel love and to love, to feel belonging and acceptance. It helps reveal the essence of our humanity, while holding incredible possibilities to address real-world issues.

Through intentional storytelling practices, I believe, we can begin to make these truths visible. Inviting communities to reclaim their own truths, dignity, and voice, on their own terms.

If a story holds truth and meaning for the teller, then it deserves to be heard.

As such, I am honored to contribute to this project this year, through my Storytelling: Gift of Hope methods and facilitation, offering particular support to the Of the People initiative through a storytelling & listening project titled “We Hold These Truths.” This initiative will create pop-up spaces for people to reflect on the ideals of freedom, dignity, service, and belonging that have shaped this nation and what feels important to discuss personally and collectively, from people of many backgrounds. While also honoring the struggles and aspirations that continue to define our collective story.

These stories are more than commemorations of the past; while that is important, they will also become invitations to shape future ideals, hopes, aspirations, and, of course, stories, that we become and lean into as a nation. 

I am excited to share reflections on this year-long project as it unfolds. I’m also more than excited that this project will form a living Smithsonian Folklife archive for future generations, of what it means to carry hope across communities, one story shared at a time.

Kudos to my friend and colleague, Dr. David O. Fakunle, a professor at Morgan State University, for first conceptualizing this idea. David, I, and colleagues from SCFCH will be hitting the road very soon- look out for us at a collaborating festival near you!

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Video: Spoken Word: Kiran Singh Sirah. Videography: Mike Synder. Music by Zero-Project- Into the Darkness. Video made in 2012. 

The inspiration for this poem, which I titled “There’s No Such Thing as Fair-Trade Cocaine,” came from my experience of working and visiting Colombia in 2009.

At the time, I was living in Scotland and was invited to take part in a social impact exchange program. I had never been to Colombia before. I had only heard about it. All I really knew was Shakira, great coffee, and something about the cocaine industry.

But while I was there, I spent a month visiting communities in Bogotá, Ibagué, and Cartagena. I connected with people doing truly beautiful social change work, including artists, organizers, community leaders, and many others. I learned that, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were around 3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) as a result of historical internal conflicts. The reality is far more layered and complex than any single statistic or story, can convey.

What I also experienced, though, was being invited into people’s homes. I felt genuinely welcomed. I felt at home in Colombia. I witnessed a country that deeply cares about its people. There was so much more to Colombia than I could ever have understood from a distance, or by simply accepting the narratives told through mainstream news.

When I returned to Scotland, I attended a music festival. I noticed people around me sipping fair trade tea, speaking passionately about justice and how progressive Great Britain is, while at the same time taking lines of cocaine, seemingly unaware that every line was fueling violence and conflict thousands of miles away.

It made me think deeply about responsibility. How can we sip fair trade tea and talk about justice while supporting an industry that is clearly not fair trade? It pushed me to reflect on trade justice more broadly, and on the systems that ignite conflict, often far away, yet never truly separate from us. We are all intrinsically linked.

So one day, I sat down and wrote the poem, “There’s No Such Thing as Fair-Trade Cocaine.”

Fifteen years ago, after I moved to the United States and was living in Washington, D.C., one of my housemates, a brilliant film director named Mike Snyder, suggested we make a video. He chose a location near our home, and we filmed it in just a couple of hours. He uploaded it, and so I now had something I could share more widely.

Since then, the poem has been used in different spaces by nonprofit leaders in Mexico, Colombia, and beyond. At times, I use it simply as an entry point into conversations about narrative change work as a whole, about storytelling, poetry, and the power of language and the spoken word, to disrupt, question, and connect.

I also love the opening line, “There’s No Such Thing…” I often use it as a prompt with young people and others who want to explore what matters to them, from what issues feel urgent, what stories need telling, what they feel called to write about and share.
If you were to think about the causes that feel important to you, and begin a poem with the first line, There’s no such thing…  I’d invite you to give it a go.

I share the poem in written form below. Although spoken word poetry lives most fully in performance, in the breath, the cadence, the pauses, the sound carried in a room. I share it on the page anyway.

There’s No Such Thing as Fair-Trade Cocaine
According to the UN Refugee Agency,
In Colombia, 3 million people
have been internally displaced
Due to a corrupt industry.

In the UK,
The nation has been hooked on Wimbledon,
or have internally displaced themselves
to Glastonbury…

White lines,
choices
goin’ through ma brain,
the hypocrisy of it though
drives me insane.

Harmless fun --
or bullets from a gun?

In Colombia,
3 million children
live in a slum.

White lines.
Choices.
40 quid a gram.
Contradictions, contrasts --
here these choices, I slam.

Pablo Escobar --
was he the man?
More convincing than that yank,
Uncle Sam.

They both need you --
it’s a bloody joke.
Sam points his finger
whilst Pablo deals coke.

Paradoxes exposed,
parallels unfold.
But the truth of the matter
is that the truth’s untold.

Living in a bubble
of champagne and trouble.
Coca blood.
Bodies found in the mud.

An exclusive club --
USA, Britain,
the cocaine hub.

Putting trade justice,
people,
rich nations to the test.

It’s been a European hippy crack fest.
The poor get vexed.
Yuppies indulge in cocaine sex.

Across the UK
it’s a middle-class spree --
cocaine and chamomile fair trade tea,
going on about being British,
oh, how great are we…

Rich folk party,
’aving a joke.
Charlie sniffs
a line of coke.

Crystal rock
get put to the crush.
London bankers
get high off the rush.

Gunboy pleasure,
middle-class leisure,
splitting a line,
feeling fine --

it’s time.
Make up your mind.

You wanna get high?
Why?

A million students
try.

Like fish in a chowder,
there’s blood in this powder.
Third world voices
get louder.

You want some more?

In Colombia,
10,000 child soldiers
are still at war.

But who exactly, though,
is violating
humanitarian law?

Oxford professors
do lines in the loo,
while Indigenous peoples
stage a coup.

Ignorant bliss --
look, there it goes.
Narcotics dreams
right up yer nose.

Human rights dampen.
Violations rampant.
Kidnappin’ and killing --
cities are filling.
Organized crime,
or just a sign of the time?

The Coca spice.
Pimpers Paradise.
Crockett and Tubbs --
Miami Vice.

We’re meddling in Medellín.
The FARC are profiting.
The powder killer,
the cocaine guerrilla.

She rolls up a twenty,
lying in bed.
A thousand magic crystals
whizz past the Queen’s head.

In Colombia,
8,000 dead.
​
White lines,
choices
goin’ through ma brain --
there’s no such thing
as fair trade cocaine.

By Kiran Singh Sirah

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One of the things I value most about festivals, whether small and local or large and national, is their ability to be deeply rooted/connected to place while also helping us make sense of the wider world.

Like a story, a festival is a liminal experience. It can impact us, change us, and stay with us. It can challenge and reaffirm who we are and who we might yet become.

Festivals may draw from local traditions and cultural expressions, and at the same time, they become civic spaces, igniting hope & possibilities for the story we want to see in our world.

They are powerful forms of participation to gather and truly witness one another.
I’ve learned this over many years from creating a multifaith peacebuilding festival in response to local and global tensions after 9/11, to neighborhood gatherings, overseeing America’s National Storytelling Festival, and helping towns incubate new bridge-building festivals of their own.  
In all these spaces, I’ve witnessed people, young and old, political opposites, sit side by side, laugh, cry, and come alive together.

Years ago, I saw an older woman holding a sign near the exit of a three-day Appalachian festival that read:

“Remember this feeling and go spread some good in the world.”

This past weekend, I was honored to serve as a convening facilitator through my Storytelling: Gift of Hope initiative as part of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s America 250 initiative, Culture: Of, By, and For the People, aligned with the Mother Tongue Film Festival.

Together, we explored what collaboration and shared responsibility truly mean in telling community stories.

As we closed the convening, I invited everyone to close their eyes, and remember the feeling they had collectively created, and to choose the feeling they wished to carry back in service to their communities and the world they imagine.

I believe this act of imagining connects hope to the future story we long to create and pass on.

Just one of the ways, I believe, we can spread some good in the world. 🌿
 
Grateful to my brilliant colleagues at Smithsonian Folklife, Leia Maahs & Rebecca Fenton (convening hosts), Ebony Bailey ( embedded researcher), Clifford Murphy, Sojin Kim, Michelle Banks, Andrea Mayorga, Annika Young, Halle Butvin, Karen Stark, Kirby Ewald, Elisa Hough, Taylor Russell, and new friends and weekend participants, Lawrence Carter-Long, Everett Osceola, Jacob Stebel, Hai-Li Kong, Hai-Yin Kong, Giacomo Francia , Gabriel Hernández-Solano, Alice Apley, Balam Toscano, Yolanda Cruz, Sam Cohn-Coisineau,

**added note: This year, I’m also honored to be part of the year-long 2026 Smithsonian programming for our “Culture of, by, and for the People" initiative. A collaboration with 30+ festivals across the United States and its territories, highlighting the traditions, creativity, and stories that shape our cultural identity. We’re bringing interactive storytelling stations to many of these festivals, exploring ways anyone can tell their story focused on the theme: “We hold these truths.” I’ll be at around 12 of these starting in June. Open to citizens and non-citizens, it’s about building a collective archive that can help explore and imagine a story for our nation’s future, in relation to the world.

Check this interactive story map to see events around the United States and in your community. 

learn more in this blog:

​
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I think I’m a bit of a romantic. But since becoming a folklorist, I’ve developed an even deeper love and appreciation for home and place. Here’s a love story, about a place, particularly a neighborhood I once called home. A time when on a cold, dreich Glasgow day, I went searching for the bones of St Valentine, and found something else instead; a Catholic nun who loved The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a neighborhood alive with languages and traditions from many parts of the world, and a community that became my home.

Years ago, around the time I first moved to Glasgow, I went on a wee solo mission to find the bones of St Valentine. I’d heard they were somewhere on the south side of the city. So on a cold, dreich, rainy day, a typical Scottish day in fact, I took the number 44 bus from Glasgow’s west end, where I was living at the time, to the south side. I crossed the River Clyde into the Gorbals and walked to St Francis Church.

I never actually found his bones. But I did discover that supposedly the relic had once sat in that church, in almost complete anonymity, for over a century. I also learned it had since been moved to another church nearby.

There, I met Sister Isabel Smythe. Her office was at St Francis, and through interfaith projects we began working together and became friends.
She was much older than me, a devoted Catholic, of course, a nun, though she didn’t wear traditional attire. She would tell me, with a mischievous smile, how she loved dressing up in a red velvet dress (as a nun!) to go and see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She also loved walking in the annual Sikh Vaisakhi parade, visiting the Gurdwara, sitting down for Langar, the community meal, and sharing Daal and Roti.

She was passionate about interfaith dialogue, a peace activist in the truest sense. She even became an official observer at the Protestant Orange fraternity marches, a staunch advocate for freedom of belief, and for dialogue between people of all faiths and traditions,  which she believed was essential to tackling Scotland’s long and painful history of sectarian division.

The following year, I moved to the south side and bought a tenement house just a few minutes’ walk from St Francis, in Govanhill, a neighborhood that was once part of the wider Gorbals.

While I live in the United States now, this community is still one I consider one of my homeplaces. I still own that flat in Govanhill. And that neighborhood carries the layered history of Glasgow’s South Side, a kind of tartan style tapestry where Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Baha’i, Buddhist, Jewish, and people of many other traditions and cultures live side by side. It is a place where, around 1938, many Jewish children, as part of the Kindertransport, came and settled to escape Nazi persecution, whose descendants I later got to work with when I worked at the Museum of Religion.

At the corner shop newspaper stand you can find papers in Urdu, Polish, Arabic, Punjabi, Irish Gaelic, and more. There’s a large Somali and Roma community now. It’s full of family-run restaurants, Kurdish, Indian, Pakistani cafés, and has its own mini version of the curry mile, with Indian sweet shops where you can get the best Gulab Jamun outside of India, next to an ice cream and fish supper–style café established by descendants of multiple generations of Italian immigrants.

This neighborhood proudly claims to be the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in all of Scotland, Scotland’s version of New York City’s Lower East Side. I remember my own neighbors telling me how they loved the fact that Mary Queen of Scots once had a battle with the English on their street.
Today, it hosts international arts festivals and carnivals, and has one of the largest contemporary art galleries in Europe, transformed from an old tramway depot station. On one street there is a church, a mosque, and a Sikh Gurdwara all within short walking distance. I remember once seeing the Imam and an Episcopal priest simply going on a casual walk together.

There’s no concrete evidence that the relic of St Valentine in Glasgow is the same St Valentine whom Pope Gelasius named February 14 a feast day for back in 496. But the story endured and that’s how stories often work, becoming part of the city’s heritage. Each year, the friars decorate the relic and offer prayers in honor of love. And over time, Glasgow became known as the “City of Love.”

But for me, it was never really about the bones.

It was the Gorbals. Govanhill. The volunteers at the soup kitchen where I volunteered. Sister Isabel. My neighbors. My twin Catholic goddaughters who still live there.

That solo mission led me to fall in love with a place, and with some extraordinarily beautiful people. That is the relic of love I carry, in my heart and my sense of home. One that travels with me wherever I go.
 
 Kiran Singh Sirah
​
This blog is part of Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, a curated initiative and blog series that explores the art of storytelling and its tremendous power to transform how we see ourselves and each other, not just despite our differences, but because of them. ​

As an immigrant, I believe deeply that multiculturalism is not a threat to American identity, it is one of its foundational values, and one of its greatest strengths. The story of this nation is bigger than any one of us. There is beauty in every lived experience, if we take the time to listen.
That responsibility, to nurture listening, belonging, and shared meaning, is something I carry with me as a public folklorist, artist, peacebuilder and cultural narrative practitioner. It shapes how I move through the world, and how I approach Storytelling: Gift of Hope.

​Whether building bridges across difference, curating new storytelling festivals, facilitating intimate story circles, or designing spaces for large-scale community festivals and dialogues, I have witnessed people, young and old, come alive through story. I have seen agency and voices strengthen, courage and curiosity grow. I’ve watched people recognize themselves as part of something larger and feel newly empowered to shape change.
This work is sacred to me.

​At the beginning of this year, I returned to my Telling Stories That Matter toolkit, revamping it, expanding it, adding new projects, and tools. But more importantly, I returned with new questions: ​

• What stories matter now?
• How can communities cultivate stories that help them meet this moment?
• What kinds of narrative practices can support justice, resilience, and care?

Those questions guided much of the year that followed.

In late 2024, Hurricane Helene deeply impacted our region in Appalachia. In the immediate aftermath, I wrote this blog reflecting on how the rivers that run through these mountains are powerful, and how our stories, when cultivated with care, are powerful too.

I accepted an invitation to serve as a Task Force Strategy Advisor for the Neighbor-to-Neighbor Disaster Relief Fund at the East Tennessee Foundation. Together, we worked to build trust-based strategies to distribute $6 million in support of long-term disaster recovery for communities across Appalachia.
​
I was also invited to keynote and lead a community dialogue for Dogwood Health Trust’s annual convening in Asheville, supporting more than 450 nonprofits and community groups across 16 counties in Western North Carolina and the Qualla Boundary. There, I spoke about storytelling as a practice and five guiding ideas on cultivating stories for hope and healing.

I was also invited to keynote Stories That Ground Us: Building Resilience Through Memory, Place, and Imagination at the inaugural symposium of the Institute for Climate and Community Resilience at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Alongside climate scientists, ecologists, artists, funders, policy experts, and community organizations, we explored how strengthening Appalachian climate science must also mean strengthening community wisdom, cultural memory, and imagination.

Closer to home, my poet friend Jasmine Henderson and I rekindled We the Poets as part of a local arts, stories, and music collaboration with local non-profit, the Philosopher’s Tea House. We were honored to both perform and also emcee the gathering, in an effort to continue building awareness around long-term healing and recovery and support the social impact groups doing this quiet, necessary work.

This year also brought moments of deep gratitude and responsibility.

I had the honor of offering the opening keynote, Stories That Sustain, and designing a new America-250 storytelling and narrative change training for 80 national disability justice practitioners, parents, and special education advocates. Reflecting on Judith Heumann and the disability rights movement she helped spark more than 50 years ago, we explored how even moments of turmoil and challenge can be transformed into opportunity. By fostering a culture of listening, we nurture a culture of belonging and full inclusion.

I am deeply grateful to the PEAK Parent Center and Idaho Parents Unlimited for trusting me to lead that work and to fellow presenter, Melissa Akie Wiley, whose research on social rejection offered a powerful storytelling companion lens throughout the two-day gathering. 

While in Sacramento, I joined my dear friend Lorena Rodríguez and her Chicha Festival collective to harvest Colombian corn for a community chicha. Together, we co-led a sacred story circle near César Chávez Plaza, drawing from our ancestral traditions and the voices of others. We closed in song, prayer, and gratitude at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers.

In Calgary, Canada, while world leaders gathered nearby for the G7, sixteen Rotary Peace Fellows from sixteen different nations came together simply as ourselves. We shared stories, rituals, poems, laughter, grief, and questions about what peace really means: globally, personally and in our work together.
​
We were welcomed by Indigenous Elders who shared the stories of the land. We walked by a glacial lake, rode a gondola up a 10,000-foot mountain, and closed with a cacao ceremony led by one of our own. None of us lead big nations. But we are leaders in our own ways, through conversation, care, and the stubborn choice to keep hope alive.

Over the summer, I returned to Washington, D.C. as a participant partner in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, themed Youth and the Future of Culture. From Indigenous skate art and lowrider culture to foodways, graffiti jams, native language reclamation, and traditional building trades, the festival explored how young people aren’t just inheriting tradition, they are reimagining it.

I had the joy of facilitating Storytelling Across Generations alongside Appalachian storytellers Malcolm and Hasan Davis, Mama Deborah Pierce Fukunle, David Fukunle, Jada Anderson, and Maryland Youth Poet Laureate Chelsea Zhu and her mentor Patrick. Chelsea told me it was her first panel discussion ever, and then she absolutely owned the National Mall on the Fourth of July!

Later that evening, over dinner with some lowrider artists from California, we joked: What if lowriders welcomed the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2028? Weeks later, one of them emailed to say conversations had begun with an official Olympic committee. That’s how imagination works, casually, relationally, and then suddenly… seriously.

Amid all of this, I also snuck in a family trip to New York City. My first time bringing my own family since my parents took me there when I was twelve. One highlight was seeing Jack Whitten’s Messenger exhibition at MoMA.

Whitten’s work is incredible, moving, personal, and highly relevant to what’s happening in our world today, and includes multiple works that explore art created out of turmoil, social unrest, and struggle. My wife (a visual artist) and I talked deeply about the work, its history, and its urgency. But what stayed with me most was watching our nine-year-old daughter encounter the art in her own way.
​
Our daughter is a dancer who loves to play, loves nature, loves ideas and colors, and also cares deeply about the world. I imagined what she experienced through her eyes.

I also just love that the painting mirrored her outfit.

Later that day, we found ourselves watching her dance freely on a subway platform, as if she were carrying the art and the museum back out into the world.

If you ever get a chance to see the work of living artist Jack Whitten. It comes highly recommended from all three of us (a visual artist, a storyteller, and a dancer!)

When I asked our daughter what she thought of New York City, she said she loved it, but couldn’t understand why people don’t drink sweet tea. Our daughter is Southern!

One of the greatest honors of this year was being selected as the inaugural recipient of the Arts & Culture Alliance’s Community Artist Grant for Gather ’Round the Table – Stories of Marshalltown.

I had never been to Marshalltown before. On paper, it is a town of 27,000 in central Iowa. In practice, it feels like an international community, shaped by migration, labor, faith, and resilience. More than 60 languages are spoken in its schools. A town that was recently featured in this New York Times article

From May to November, I served as a socially engaged storytelling artist, spending time and facilitating storytelling in schools, libraries, social service projects, cafés, neighborhoods, and the Iowa Veterans Home. I asked people not how they wanted to participate, but how they wanted to help shape the work.

That question changed everything.

What emerged was a shared longing to be a fully inclusive community of welcome. That longing came alive through kitchen-table conversations, front-porch storytelling, school visits, immigrant justice potlucks, intergenerational sunset walks, and a culminating live storytelling evening, reaching more than 800 direct participants. While I am still writing up that experience, as a case study for my toolkit and other publications, I offer an overview of the project. A docuseries of the project will also be coming out soon.
​
I believe deeply in the wisdom of rural and small towns. Gather ’Round the Table reaffirmed that when people are invited to imagine and speak from lived experience, storytelling becomes a powerful form of civic care.

This year also asked me to steward and help shape creative initiatives across fields, institutions, and movements.

I served as Storyteller in Residence for the Appalachia Funders Network, where I led Stories from the Front Porch, a series of civic imagining plenaries and community conversations with more than 150 funders, practitioners, artists, and changemakers from across Appalachia and beyond. I was also invited to lead the Stories That Shape Us plenary at the Appalachian Big Ideas Festival, continuing a regional conversation about imagination, power, and belonging.

Alongside this, I led a series of Creative Consultancies, exploring how public narratives contribute to democracy through arts, culture, civic-minded citizenship, and a deeper sense of belonging. Some of this work will continue into the new year and feels increasingly relevant in the moment we are in.
​
I was invited to serve as a discussant for The Power of Dialogue to Build Community as part of International Development Week, hosted by the Atlantic Council for International Cooperation in partnership with Canada. I also had the honor of serving as a South Arts Cultural Advisor for Walking Together, a national philanthropy initiative funded by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, supporting cultural vitality investments across all 56 U.S. states and jurisdictions; and providing advisory input to New Pluralists Collaborative Breakthrough Fund, a multi-million-dollar effort focused on strengthening trust, belonging, and cooperation in communities across the country.

This year, I continued my service on the Board of the American Folklore Society, helping host its 137th annual meeting in Atlanta, where nearly 900 folklorists, cultural workers, and scholars gathered around the theme of restoring and restorying. As one of the nation’s oldest cultural organizations, it is an honor to help steward this work, and I’m especially excited that our 138th annual meeting will be held in Asheville in 2026, much closer to home.

I was invited by my colleague Dr. Benjamin Gatling to author Chapter One, “The Transformative Power of Storytelling – A Social Force for Social Change,” adapted from my Botkin Lecture at the Library of Congress. The chapter offers practical, everyday ways storytelling can foster dialogue, pluralism, and civic imagination. As a whole, Migration Stories: Connecting Activism, Policy, and Scholarship offers actionable ideas for how ethical storytelling can be used in everyday life, community dialogue, and cross-sector work to foster a more pluralistic society. Now available via the University of Illinois Press (with Oxford University Press/Oxford Academic). I was also deeply moved to learn that my 2016 lecture, The Transformative Power of Storytelling, has now been digitized and made publicly available as part of the American Folklife Center’s Library of Congress Botkin Lecture archive.

At the invitation of my colleague Dr. Susan Hartley, I had the honor of contributing a Storytelling: A Gift of Hope reflection to Global Voices for Peace, a powerful anthology that brings together more than 100 peacebuilders from over 50 nations to explore what peacebuilding looks like in practice across the world. This collection offers hopeful, grounded reflections that deepen conscious discourse on peace while inviting individual and collective participation in the peace process. The anthology traces the intersections of peace and conflict with urgent global realities, including climate and environmental crises, food insecurity, inequality, gender justice, migration, sport, colonialism, health, and mental health. Proceeds from Global Voices for Peace support Right to Learn Afghanistan, advancing education for Afghan women and girls, and the Rotary Peace Fellows Alumni Association, which works to mobilize a global network of more than 1,700 peace fellows in the ongoing promotion of peace worldwide.
​
And finally, I was honored to contribute Every Meal is a Story- Haldi, Lune, Mirch, Masala to PeaceMeal—an anthology of culinary stories from 40 global peacebuilders, nourishing hope through food, memory, and resilient peacebuilding in times of conflict. Edited by my Australian friend, Dr. Tania Miletic, this book is a reminder that in times like these, when conflict and division weigh heavily, one of the simplest and most powerful acts we can do is share a meal, to break bread, and know that every meal is a story. Since food, like peace, is meant to be shared.

As we move into a year when this nation formally marks its 250th anniversary, I’m holding this truth close: America is a story in progress. As a 15-year immigrant to this country and since becoming a new American in 2023, I truly believe it is an experiment that holds real potential, if we are willing to listen, reckon, and imagine together. As such, I’m also deeply honored to be a recipient of the Waymakers Appalachian Futurism Liberation Fellowship, a regional BIPOC + LGBTQI+ + Working Class intersectional solidarity project rooted in the place I call home.

In 2026, I’ll be stepping into a year-long, in-depth multi-city storytelling collaboration exploring how communities across our nation are creating meaning and truth around America 250. Shaped by place and culture, and what civic identity, truth-telling, and shared stories can make possible.  I’m excited to be collaborating on this project, not just to reflect on stories of the past, but to help us explore the story of our future potential.

I’ll be on the road a lot this year, especially with the latter project, so I hope to connect with friends and colleagues along the way.

And there is more to come.

For now, I remain grateful for the stories shared with me, for the people who trusted me to listen, and for all those who hold the belief that storytelling, practiced with care, can still help us meet this moment.
​
With gratitude and hope,
​
Kiran

Past Newsletters: 
February 2025. 
October 2024

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A really beautiful documentary about my friend Daniel Kish was recently released by The New Yorker. I watched it with a full heart.

Daniel and I caught up on the phone recently. He’s in California and I’m in Tennessee. We’ve known each other for years, but like many friendships, ours deepened during the pandemic. We became weekly ritual FaceTime buddies, sipping whisky and having long, wandering conversations, the kind of curious talk that helps you make sense of the world when the world itself feels somewhat unsteady. We spoke about life, storytelling, how we mentor and teach, peacebuilding, and many more shared interests and ideas. Daniel has been, and continues to be, a big influence in my life.

Many people know Daniel as the world’s leading specialist in human echolocation, the ability to create soundscapes to perceive and navigate the world, much like a bat. Through clicks of the tongue and attentive listening, Daniel and those he teaches learn to read space, distance, texture, and movement. What looks impossible to most of us becomes not only possible, but deeply freeing.

For years, Daniel has worked with people, particularly blind and visually impaired people, to help remove fear of the dark. He’s also trained marines and travelled the world over sharing what he knows with all different kinds of communities.  He does this not by denying risk or difficulty, but by cultivating deep listening, trust in one’s own perception, and an intimate relationship with the unknown.

Over time, Daniel and I have found ourselves returning to a question. If humans can literally learn to navigate darkness, learn to remove fear, what might that teach us, metaphorically, about how society could face its fear of the unknown?

What would it mean for our communities, cultures, and institutions to listen more carefully? and what would that do to help imagine possibilities, together. To move through uncertainty not with panic or paralysis, but with curiosity, imagination, and care?

Daniel once wrote:
“We essentially remove fear from ourselves and our lives. Life then becomes an intriguing tapestry of puzzles, adventures, and discoveries.”
He has also described echolocation as “establishing the knowns within the unknowns, something like navigating by the stars.” You don’t need to see everything at once. You chart your way by listening, by noticing patterns, by creating reference points as you go. In his words, it’s “a bit like making it into a story.”

That framing idea, making it into a story, is where Daniel’s work and my own storytelling practice most clearly connect. (Daniel is also a brilliant storyteller, singer, and artist). Stories don’t eliminate uncertainty. They help us move through it. They give us bearings. They allow us to imagine beyond the present moment, to glimpse into futures that aren’t yet visible, or even fully real, but are still possible.

A few years back, Daniel came to stay with me for a week. We hiked on the Appalachian Trail. He met my friends and family. We ate local BBQ. We talked late into the night, about listening, about trust, about what it means to be human in a world that can feel fragmented and afraid.
I wrote about that time, and some of what Daniel taught me, here: The Art of Deep Listening

Watching The New Yorker documentary brought all of this back. Daniel himself told me he appreciated what they created, and I do too. The film captures not only the extraordinary nature of his work, but also the care, generosity, and love he brings to it, and into the world.

​At a time when so much of our collective life is shaped by fear, fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of one another, fear of futures we don’t yet understand, I find Daniel’s work deeply poignant. It reminds us that the answer isn’t to harden ourselves or build a tough exterior of so-called “resilience,” but to listen more closely. To build new ways of sensing the world together. And to trust that step by step, we can navigate what lies ahead.

I hope you’ll watch the documentary and spend time with Daniel’s work. I hope it offers you, as it continues to offer me, a sense of inspiration and a reminder that even in dark times, there are ways we can imagine, personally and collectively, how to move forward together.
 
I keep returning to it as a reminder that fear doesn’t have to be the thing that defines our next steps. With care, curiosity, and deep listening, even the dark can become a place of discovery.
 
That feels like something worth holding onto right now.
 
Watch the New Yorker documentary here:

Kiran Singh Sirah
​
This blog is part of Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, a curated initiative and blog series that explores the art of storytelling and its tremendous power to transform how we see ourselves and each other, not just despite our differences, but because of them. ​

The Arts & Culture Alliance identified Building Bridges as the guiding theme for the Community Artist Grant, one of five priorities outlined in Marshalltown’s Arts & Culture Master Plan. The Alliance articulated this theme as:

• Authentically connecting different communities
• Building infrastructure for access to neighborhoods and assets
• Bridging past, present, and future
• Restoring trust between individuals, communities, and organizations
• Creating pathways toward economic sustainability
• Connecting people to causes they care about

This framework aligned deeply with my own work as a cultural narrative storyteller, public folklorist, peacebuilder, and socially engaged artist. Drawing from my research on the aesthetics of home and years of practice using storytelling to foster dialogue and understanding, I approached the residency as a relational process rooted in care, listening, and co-creation.

I believe community members are already storytellers. They carry traditions, personal histories, and cultural practices that often need only to be seen, heard, and validated through public recognition. ACA’s vision offered a clear entry point to explore storytelling as heritage, creative expression, and community vitality.

Over two weeks, the residency included six major public events, along with extensive youth and educational engagement. More than 800 people participated overall.
Core Public Events:

• Storytelling: A Gift of Hope – Iowa Veterans Home (50 attendees)
• Home Is a Story We Tell Together – ACA Main Street Space (80 attendees)
• Stories That Shape Us, Stories That Free Us – Mowry Irvine Mansion (35 attendees)
• Every Meal Is a Story – Immigrant Allies 15th Anniversary Potluck (150 attendees)
• One Home, Many Stories – Intergenerational Sunset Walk with YMCA–YWCA (25 attendees)
• Humans of Marshalltown: Stories Told Live – Culminating Event (100 attendees)

The final event featured five local storytellers representing different sectors of the community. I worked closely with each participant through one-on-one coaching and preparation, hosting the evening as a facilitated, front-porch-style conversation that wove past, present, and future.

Youth, Education & Media Engagement
Additional engagements included:

• Marshalltown High School assembly (300 students)
• Writing workshops with 10th graders (25 students)
• Library “Learn Over Lunch” sessions (35 attendees)
• Rotary Club presentation (30 attendees)
• Interactive Story Wall exhibit (100+ contributors)
• Local radio and newspaper coverage

As arts leaders, visionaries, and advocates, we are trained to celebrate the "wins." We post about the prestigious grants, the sold-out events, and the major awards. We draft press releases for the achievements that validate our hard work. But there is a quiet, collective reluctance to talk about the projects that didn't go as planned, the applications that were rejected, or the ideas that seemingly backfired.

There is still a lingering taboo around failure. However, when I reflect on the most significant milestones of my career, I realize that what we often label as "rejection" is actually a vital opportunity to refine our vision.

In my experience, some of the most successful projects, including an award-winning digital media initiative and a major partnership with a regional hospital, didn't start with a "yes." They began as unsuccessful grant proposals. Those initial rejections weren't dead ends; they were catalysts. They forced us to sharpen our ideas, ask harder questions, and eventually execute a much stronger version of the original concept. This dynamic isn't just professional; it’s personal. Years ago, after receiving my first green card to the United States at 19, I was forced to return to the UK due to my mother’s sudden passing. At the time, it felt like a crushing professional setback on top of a personal tragedy. But that "failure" of timing led to a second chance later in life, one I was far better prepared to handle.

Similarly, my first application to a major international fellowship was rejected. But that "no" opened a dialogue. The feedback I received encouraged me to lean into my passion for storytelling and folklore, which ultimately defined my entire career path. "Failure" is often just a signal that we are on the right track, but we still have a little more work to do.

Whether you are leading an arts organization, a community initiative, or a personal passion project, taking the "long view" is essential. In the heat of a crisis or a budget shortfall, setbacks feel urgent and terminal. But when we look back, we often see that our most challenging periods were actually times of intense personal growth and the forging of lifelong connections.

Being vulnerable about these setbacks is just as important as celebrating the wins. It helps us feel less alone and reveals that "wins" and "losses" are simply two different parts of the same creative process.

Recently, I led a team through a grueling three-stage application process for a grant from a major national foundation. We made it to the final round, an incredible feat, and then, we didn’t get it.

I won't lie, it was a disappointment. But as the dust settled, the perspective shifted. Being considered in the final round was a massive validation of our shared mission. That "failed" application led to an invitation to present work directly to the foundation’s senior leadership. We were able to go deeper than the pages of an application, sharing decades of experience in cultural preservation and storytelling.

We would never have had that seat at the table without the "failed" application.

In recent years, we have all had to become more agile, more responsive, and more creative in how we reach our audiences and advocate for our causes. We’ve learned to explore new applications for our work, from healthcare to social justice, often because the "traditional" paths were temporarily closed to us.

By all means, let’s acknowledge our wins. But let’s also be thankful for the setbacks we experience along the way. They almost always help us come back stronger.

Kiran Singh Sirah
​
This blog is part of Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, a curated initiative that explores the art of storytelling and its tremendous power to transform how we see ourselves and each other, not just despite our differences, but because of them.