Speak Your Story
Speak Your Story is a narrative platform that uplifts real voices of resilience.
The participants featured — including those in our montage — are students from TCTF (The Creative Thinkers Forum) and Nisarg Foundation, where we conducted a seven-part narrative writing workshop series. Through these workshops, students explored self-expression, reflection, and storytelling as tools for empowerment.
Each story, whether from a young learner in Delhi or a serviceman in Singapore, captures one simple truth: every experience is worth sharing when told with honesty and heart.
Our Work
National Service in Singapore
As a national serviceman in the Singapore Armed Forces serving in the Military Police, I’ve had the privilege of hearing deeply personal stories from fellow servicemen—stories of identity, pressure, perseverance, and transformation. Through Speak Your Story, I’ve begun documenting these experiences to show the emotional complexity and human depth behind a mandatory rite of passage that is often misunderstood or oversimplified. These narratives challenge the rigid definitions of masculinity and strength, offering space for vulnerability, doubt, and rediscovery.
Manzil, Delhi
In India, I collaborate with Manzil, an NGO based in Delhi that provides creative and educational opportunities for children and youth from underserved communities. Through storytelling workshops and one-on-one mentorship, I’ve helped students write personal narratives that explore themes such as family, aspirations, trauma, and joy. These stories, raw and unfiltered, reveal how much potential lies in voices that are too often overlooked. Speak Your Story is proud to share these stories globally, connecting them with readers who might otherwise never encounter such perspectives.
Nisarg, Delhi
In Delhi, I work with Nisarg's education programs, supporting students from marginalized communities. After identifying a critical gap in learning resources, I led a fundraising initiative that provided bookshelves to create dedicated reading spaces—small infrastructural changes that signal these students' learning matters. Through Speak Your Story workshops, I help students document how access to books and structured environments transforms their educational experience, revealing that marginalized students don't lack ambition but face compounding barriers that middle-class students never notice.
The Creative Thinkers Forum, Delhi
At The Creative Thinkers Forum in Okhla Phase-1, I raised SGD 1,400 for their life skills program and now lead storytelling and discipline workshops. As head of these initiatives, I guide children from underserved communities to articulate their experiences navigating poverty, family responsibility, and educational aspirations. Through Speak Your Story, these narratives—written in voices that blend Hindi and English—reveal the sophisticated decision-making that marginalized children employ daily. Their stories challenge deficit narratives, showing young people not as passive recipients but as strategic agents making calculated choices within constrained systems.
Passion to Serve, Singapore
In Singapore, I partner with Passion to Serve to deliver financial literacy workshops for migrant workers at recreation centers in Sembawang and Kranji. Many workers face exploitation through debt traps, unfair contracts, and remittance fees that eat into their earnings. By teaching budgeting, contract literacy, and financial planning, I help workers protect themselves from predatory systems. Through Speak Your Story, I've documented how economic vulnerability intersects with limited language access and information asymmetries—showing that financial literacy is not just about money management but about reclaiming agency in systems designed to extract value from the most vulnerable.
About Devarya
A military police sergeant in the Singapore Armed Forces, aspiring to shed light on the powerful tool that is narrative writing, and how it can be utilised to express emotions, heal trauma, and empower yourself.