Finding Fertile Ground: Stories of Grit, Resilience, and Fertile Ground
Society & Culture
Sankar Raman immigrated to the U.S. from India to attend graduate school. After a successful career in high tech, he now applies his technical knowledge, managerial skills, and pragmatic mind to founding and leading The Immigrant Story, a nonprofit organization that fosters empathy and builds a more inclusive community by sharing immigrant stories. You can reach Sankar at sankar@theimmigrantstory.org.
I’ve been volunteering this year with The Immigrant Story, working on a storytelling event featuring people from Mexico and Guatemala who entered the United States undocumented, and we just launched that event on Saturday. You can view that event on YouTube. Volunteering with The Immigrant Story has given me a wonderful opportunity to work with Sankar and see his incredible vision for the organization he founded in response to the heightened xenophobia after the 2016 election.
Sankar grew up in a four-street village in deep southeast India, about 150 miles south of Chennai, and attended the only school in the village, which happened to be operated by his father. He describes it as India’s version of Kyoto, with thousands of temples and surrounded by silk weavers and rice paddies.
His father was determined to make education accessible to all, including the Dalit community, which became a bit of a scandal. "He really wanted everyone in that village to go to his school, irrespective of which caste they belonged to," said Sankar. "He truly believed that if you get your education, you can get out of your poverty."
Sankar and his friends could walk through the open door of any house and know they would be welcomed and fed. His parents didn’t worry about him returning until 8 or 9 at night because they knew the community would feed him and take care of him.
The xenophobia after the 2016 election prompted him to start The Immigrant Story. After retiring from Intel, he’d been focusing on photography, traveling through India, Japan, and the East Coast, and capturing his travels digitally. He would write captions for his photos, and the captions became longer and longer until they became stories.
Sankar decided to start telling the stories of immigrants, especially immigrants of color, by expanding his photography and captions. He officially opened the nonprofit in April 2017 with seven stories. Then in May, the MAX attack happened in Portland, devastating our city and exposing white nationalist hatred.
Now The Immigrant Story has about 50 volunteers. To date, they have interviewed 170 people and published 150+ stories. In the last few years, the organization has begun delving into other initiatives (live storytelling events, photography exhibitions, videos, podcasts, and educational curriculum), but the core to the nonprofit is stories and photography. In 2019, The Immigrant Story was named as Portland's Best New Nonprofit at the Portland Monthly Light a Fire Awards.
Read more about Sankar in this longer blog post. Next week we feature The Reformed Whores, a NYC-based feminist comedy musical duo.
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