The Sága Scholarship Program

Within the Sága ethos of women and girls telling their own stories as part of the historical record and citizen journalism, interested student applicants will pitch a story from their own life - one that they would ultimately hope to see become a professionally produced media segment in mini-doc form.

What sorts of stories?

Anything at all that's compelling.

It could be the overcoming of adversity, health issues, racism, living through war, accomplishing a unique achievement, securing a victory through activism or organizing. The role in a family, a community, or one’s unique ethnic, religious, or other identity background.

Or, as part of our ethos of historiographic justice and getting the stories of women from previous generations before they’re gone, we’d love to see submissions that make generational links in interviews between women and girls in families. Interview your great-grandmother about her immigration story and how your family came to be. Interview your grandmother on her experiences in the civil rights movement. The floor is yours - to learn about your own family history and share it with the world.

The pride of a finished product—a professionally made mini-doc or news style segment piece telling the girl’s story and/or that of her family lineage—will be something indispensable. And its use towards a future portfolio and personal branding in camp, scholarship, and university applications will give the student a serious leg up in their admissions processes to come.

Our project at its base depends upon getting stories from women and girls all around the world, including regions dealing with poverty, instability, or limited opportunity. As we can all guess, some of the very most compelling stories will come from inhabitants of these places. It would never do to only compile the stories of those from the most prosperous places or lifestyles.

What would be a reasonable price for video production for a young woman attending a top school in North America might as well be a million dollars to a girl struggling to get an education in the developing world. Impossible and completely out of reach.

We accept a certain number of girls annually at each economic level. We want to choose the best candidates and most powerful storytellers in a completely need-blind fashion.

As such, The Sága Scholars Program is centrally founded in "pay it forward" principles. This means we'll ask you some questions about your life and family circumstances to help us with our sliding scale metrics-- to determine the economic bracket in which we should categorize you. It also means that if you're privileged, you'll be helping to subsidize the materials of girls you'd never meet from around the world-- girls who could never pay. And this is yet another benefit of taking part in the project.