The ERA Films desk (anchored at Green Hub) was set up with the main goal of making 6 films on restoration each year (2 by each hub).
The films are made by Green Hub fellows who, after their training, do internships at partner organisations. This model worked well for ERA and, in Year 1, fellows visited restoration sites across the country to make some incredible films. You can find a playlist of these films here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAAkbAzjkpg&list=PL5uBRMT3LETg4_vCbtr1UJ4TjlHKxBNds
Feedback from the fellows in Year 1 gave us a couple of key learnings:
- The fellows had no prior background or understanding of restoration, which made it difficult for them to document the stories once they were in the field.
- Fellows usually get to pick the topics they would like to film, but because they had not been given any exposure to restoration, they weren’t able to make informed choices and were instead randomly assigned to restoration internships.
To navigate this, the Films desk, in collaboration with the Education desk (anchored at Adavi Trust), designed a 3-day Introduction to Restoration course. This fit well into the existing Green Hub training module.
The course is designed to run annually at each of the 3 hubs (North East, Central India and Western Himalayas) and give fellows a foundational understanding of ecological restoration concepts. This helps them better understand the stories they encounter and create more informed films during their internships.
These courses ran for the first time in Year 2 (2025), following which we had many more learnings to take away and build on. This brings us to this year’s trainings, which have now been largely standardised for the different regions and can be replicated each year without much additional effort.
Here are the reports from this year’s trainings:
Green Hub Western Himalayas 1st - 3rd July, 2026 | Theog, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i_cJpR09CX1xXF8SszAjwtjfKedyt5dr/view?usp=sharing
Green Hub North East 29th June to 1st July, 2026 | Tezpur, Assam - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_X18MZulNKRpvjGgHM3pNlqmbjytGf0-/view?usp=sharing