Lil Trails (@liltrails) was an initiative by us, Rajavel and Avanti (@rajavelsundararajan and @avantinatarajan) to share our parenting experiences with Lil’D, which quickly went on to become a platform to connect with parents and children. Though we have this idea from many years ago, we were just putting it aside and a long car drive did give us the spark to get it up in shape.
The lockdown in fact got us to give that little dream a pair of wings. On March 18th, We received a call from Janaki Aunty (@maajanaki) asking if we would be interested in hosting an Online storytelling event since the schools had announced leave and the children were all stuck inside. We started off on 18th March and it went on to be the 1st Online Storytelling event in the region as the lockdown was announced, we went on to have an Online Storytelling Festival, on Insta Live as Story and Craft evenings with Janaki Aunty and Team Lil Trails – Avanti and Rajavel. It was indeed an awesome 11 days of incessant stories for children, many of which you can still find on our IGTV or on Janaki Sabesh’s YouTube Channel. Since then, we have conducted innumerable Storytelling events for children on Zoom and for some organizations combining it with Craft/Art activities for children by our Co-founder, Avanti.
Lil Community was an offshoot of Lil Trails that focused on creating a community of domain experts, parents and children to enable parents and children to learn from a community of experts. We have had 2 editions of the show with each one running for 10 episodes. It indeed had a lot of learning and the entire repository of the Lil Community talks is up on our IGTV. Why should only little children have all the fun of storytelling? That’s how we started off Big Tales for Big People and organized The Other Sita and its popularity had it being screened 3 times over the year.
Lil Trails collaborated with Janaki Sabesh and @flintobox to organize a Storywriting event for children and it indeed brought in so many creative stories. The most creative 2 stories were narrated by Janaki aunty and you can listen to them on our IGTV too. This was part of our Children’s month’s celebration rather than just a day’s celebration for it. We had also put together several festive events organized for children – Krishna Jayanthi, Diwali and Christmas. We ended the year on a high note with Margazhi Trails – a story and music event where we collaborated with @maajanaki and @madhuvanthibadri. Thank all the Lil ones and parents for supporting Lil Trails and all our events.
Wishing you all a Happy New Year. Looking forward to 2021 with many more events and hopefully being able to launch them as physical events.