There is a difference between finishing a programme and joining a community. Story Village exists to hold the second.

Story Village is the Realness Institute alumni network platform. It is a dedicated online home for the writers, producers and industry professionals who have come through our labs since 2016. We have taken our lively WhatsApp group chat and turned it into a much more functional continuing education community.

For a decade, Realness has gathered African and Afro-diasporic storytellers into rooms and watched what happens there. The love that blooms in these rooms is material. The care, mentorship, and devotion that has accumulated over a decade is in full bloom.  But the most durable thing our alumni carry out of a program is usually each other. The co-producer met over breakfast, the mentor who became a colleague, script consultants who understood the draft before it was clear, a peer three countries away working through the same problem. Until now, these relationships were loosely held in a WhatsApp group when the program ended and chance encounters in markets around the world. 

Now, Story Village elevates that proposition by becoming a home for our garden to continue to bloom. Named by our 9-person alumni advisory council, who include some of the new leaders of our industry on the continent, this platform is a shared resource for us to continue our learning and greenlight each other.

There are two levels of access. The inner circle is for alumni only. The outer circle is for applicants that want to join our community. These are separate spaces within the digital platform.

The inner circle is a place where the whole alumni body meets across cohorts and disciplines. There will be something for everyone from a video library of resources that include lectures from our world-class pedagogical experts, script clubs with African screenwriters sharing their produced films, on-demand digital courses to continue your learning, business coaching, works-in-progress pitching sessions for writer/directors looking for producers, and so much more.  

The platform was previewed by the alumni advisory council last month and we are currently making the changes they requested. We are hoping to have everything ready to ship to everyone by August 2026. 

For everyone else, the outer circle of services will include courses, workshops, and our submission portal. Every year we have to turn away hundreds of amazing applicants for our screenwriting and producing programs. Now we have something to offer all of you regardless of whether or not you get into one of our programs. This has been a long-time desire, and a generous donation by a new artist-patron has made it possible. We will share more about who in the coming months. For now, just know we are thrilled to finally be extending some value-adding educational opportunities to the wider pan-African community of storytellers.

Make sure you sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know when our first Story Village workshops go live for the larger community of storytellers interested in learning with us. In closing, a village is not a service you subscribe to. It is a place you show up to contribute, to receive from, and to be seen. That is the invitation. Hope to see you inside.