I joined Sahapedia as a Heritage Walk Leader and Project Coordinator for walks, a new outreach initiative.

 

Walks are very common in Delhi, but what fascinated me was the concept of fee-free walks, open to all. These walks allow heritage and culture enthusiasts to explore various facets of a city, both known and less explored, without shelling out a huge sum.

 

The growth of these walks since November 2016 has been, quite commendable. Word has spread like wildfire, and it has been an achievement for us to have grown from one city (Delhi) to 40 cities by September 2018.

 

 

One of the greatest achievements of this project has been the organisation of walks in lesser known cities such as Bharuch, Shillong, Itanagar, Vijayawada and Howrah. The list keeps growing. Hopefully, it will continue to grow.

 

Initially,about 5 to 10 walks would be conducted in a month, but with more dedicated walk leaders across cities, we now have 30 to 40 walks scheduled in a month.

 

 

 

Every walk leader has different reasons that inspire them to conduct these walks, and every participant has their own personal reasons to attend a walk. It takes two to tango –an inspired walk leader, and interested participants to make a walk perfect and successful.

 

Each walk sees a lot of interactions and sharing of stories between family members, grandparents, teachers and friends. These stories add flavour to these trails, other than the narration that is provided by the walk leader.  

 

The walk stories shared by participants via email or on TripAdvisor are very inspiring and keep me motivated to add more walks and cities to our growing list. After all, it is both quality and quantity together that makes a difference.

 

With the excellent use of social media, updates of new walks circulate, and the registrations for the walks in some cities fill up on the very day of the upload, and the responses are simply overwhelming. We, at Sahapedia, strive to reach the same soaring result for every walk.

 

This network of walks that we conduct is not the work of a one-man army; it is the vision and hard work of the whole Outreach team, at Sahapedia. Kudos to the team, for working endlessly to develop and expand the network.