SAWN Monthly Spotlight: Ritika Ganguly

1. Tell us about your work and what inspired you to start WeCollab LLC?

I’ve had positive relationships with academic, artistic, corporate, and nonprofit worlds in different cultural contexts, in different parts of the globe. When I was leading the qualitative research team at IMRB International - India’s oldest and largest market research company, back in 2014, I remember convincing a team, mostly comprising MBAs, that ‘sales’ wasn’t about ‘pitching.’ At that time, I was gradually growing into an understanding that listening deeply and storytelling collaboratively for mutually beneficial outcomes is the most foundational tool to build trust and connectedness in business. In the corporate world, people tend to talk about bottom lines as if these lines are outside of frames where people are at the core. I am interested in engaging the history of a place, of a people, no matter how profit-driven the work may be. I tried to bring - to my then market research business role - open and iterative processes where storylistening was as powerful a tool for creating connection, as was storytelling. I think it was that understanding that led me to found my LLC – WeCollab, about seven years later, and half-way across the globe! ? ? ?

WeCollab is a thought partner that helps organizations and individuals claim and tell their own stories. I am mostly committed to the mission-driven world now, but also sometimes to academia, and for-profit companies. Narrative is power. And through agile storytelling, ethnographic interviewing, and strategic grant writing, we advise organizations on how to improve the reach of their narrative. Promoting responsible storytelling and storylistening is one of our key values. We share tools and cultivate the ability to recognize that people alone must shape the stories about who they are, what they do, and what they want. ?

So, a large part of what we do is to connect people with the means and moneys to do their work through the detour of how they talk about their work in the world. For example, recently an arts nonprofit hired us to articulate how their work could be understood as Public Humanities. Public Humanities is emerging as a hot field, with millions of federal and state dollars being directed to it. At its core, the field refers to projects that bring the ideas of the humanities to life for general audiences through public programming. And, while many organizations in our community have done projects like these for years, sometimes they are not able to do justice to their depth of work because they are not able to position it, or narrativize it in quite those terms. That is where I step in – I help them narrate their story from a historical and institutional point of view. Part of my job is to learn the language(s) of different audiences and decision-makers, the funders, the populations served, and the myriad end users in the community, and think about that responsibility with an artist heart. ?

2.??????Can you talk to us about your professional journey? What are some of the challenges you faced when you were starting out?

I am a creature of multiple communities. I have journeyed through Indian, French, and American academia, Indian social movement collectives, the American nonprofit world, the Indian corporate world, artist communities, and of course, belong to multiple linguistic communities. All of this has shaped my professional journeys in very deep ways. While my formal training is in cultural anthropology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), I train with Baul musicians (folk musicians in Bengal) in music composition, storytelling, and strategies that deepen our aptitude to hear. I stand solidly in these different webs of belonging. And I can’t separate my coming of age into a framework of transdisciplinary thinking from the ongoing relationships I have with(in) each of these communities. ?

What I have found most challenging through this journey is to collaborate with organizations or individuals that are committed to hierarchies. My work tries to foster an openness that is most conducive to networks rather than hierarchies, and to the wisdom of the crowd, rather than chains of command. I feel the push and pull of this constantly, as an artist, a consultant, and a parent!

3.?????What do you consider your biggest accomplishment so far??

I think the slow realization that more than accomplishing, it is about a constant unraveling of one’s purpose and potential. That’s a lifelong goal for me. I want to acknowledge that I have been advantaged by being born into an upper caste – a caste that is at the very top of the graded social hierarchical system that is the caste system in India. This has afforded me all kinds of privileges, privileged migration, modes of academic mobility, and so on.

I am also a woman, and a woman of color, in a highly inequitable social structure here in the US. And I am thrilled to be held by an extremely supportive community that lets me show up in my work as a whole person. Since starting my consultancy, I have helped organizations and creative entrepreneurs secure over $1.8 million in funding from public agencies and foundations to implement their work. Our thought partnership has helped organizations secure highly competitive federal, state, public agencies and foundation grants including the National Endowment for Humanities, US. Department of Justice, National Endowment for the Arts, Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence, Michigan Humanities, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. WeCollab’s work is beginning to be seen nationally, by ‘clients’ beyond Minnesota, and I am excited about that milestone!

4.?????What advice would you give someone who is interested in starting out in their entrepreneurial path???

Wherever you stand is a frontline. This is a piece of advice I received from Relational Strategist Leah Manaema and it has really helped me shape my work in the world. And so much of this work is internal and relational. Being aware of who you want to walk forward with, who you want to build a shared future with, and who you want to strengthen strategy with – these considerations help in charting out the intention of your own path. And the other thing is that it takes time. We operate in a culture of acceleration, but everything has its own tempo, and we cannot speed things up. Work takes place in time; experience takes place in time. Figuring out how to relate ethically and carefully via one’s work, takes time, and it certainly takes a village.

5.??????What are you most excited about in 2024?

I think I am most excited about this South Asian operatic work that we’re currently creating to premier at the Minnesota Opera later this Fall! The story and its telling follow a logic of folk ballads and musical theater I grew up watching in Delhi, Bengal, and Bangalore. I used to be mesmerized at how effectively scenes from the epics, folk tales, contemporary Bengali literature, and even anecdotes, were re-enacted with very powerful narration and singing. Ever since MN Opera commissioned me to compose my first (mini) opera in a non-classical opera language (Bangla!) back in 2022, I have been inspired to contribute to the bigger work that disrupts the canon, and opera, as we know it here in the West - Opera with a capital O. South Asian musical theater and opera is a combination of music, drama, stylized speech, and spectacle, and different regions often follow different formats in which to present their opera, depending on the region’s artistic and oral histories. In this sense, opera in South Asia is not a singular word. I try to cultivate this imagination in the creation and presentation of opera here in MN.

Nida Sajid – Professor in the Department of AMES at the 美国明尼苏达大学双城分校 – and I were awarded the Imagine Fund grant and the IDEAS award from the U last year, to innovate the ways in which we can inspire community conversations around climate change beyond the classroom. As a transdisciplinary practitioner, I am always seeking ways and means to connect disciplines, genres, cultural worlds, and languages. I look forward to hearing what resonates and how, what doesn’t, and how audiences here will ‘listen’ to the story of a child growing up in a forest in Central India. The child - Kopo - meets Kea - a mushroom - growing in a different part of the world, and her mycelium spreads all under the forest floor of the child’s residence. The two characters represent complex impulses to migrate, stay rooted, and ultimately, do something about climate colonialism. I was inspired to write this story as I engaged more and more with the outstanding work of the community-based organization ‘The Third Eye Portal’, based in India. The work is set to an incredible libretto written by Shinjan Sengupta, a thoughtfully constructed scenic design by Joshua Martin, a loving and sharp guidance by Artistic Director Masanari Kawahara , an empathetic interpretation of the lead character by Clay Man Soo, and a dream team of artists on stage and behind the scenes. This opera will also feature my first family in MN - Black elder and storyteller Vusumuzi Zulu. He will be the narrator in this piece.

Save the dates for September 20 and 21, 2024, to watch the premier of ‘The Mushroom that Swallowed the Moon Whole’. I would love to see you and our communities, there!