Get involved

Three ways to take part

Give time, work with us as an organisation, or fund the parts that cost money.

We would rather list six honest roles than claim there is a place for everyone. Each one below is work we actually need doing, with the time commitment written down so you can decide before you write to us.

Volunteer

Where the help actually goes

Field documentation assistant

In the valleys · Two to four weeks, seasonal

Carrying and setting up recording equipment, keeping the session log, managing files at the end of each day. Long hours, uneven ground, cold evenings. No experience needed beyond care and stamina.

Translator and transcriber

Remote or in the valleys · Ongoing, a few hours a week

Working from recordings in Burushaski, Khowar, Shina, Wakhi, Balti or Kalasha into Urdu or English. Native or near-native speakers especially wanted, including from the diaspora.

Photographer or videographer

In the valleys · By expedition

Documentary work under our consent protocol, which is stricter than most commissions you will have worked to. Portfolio and a conversation before anything is agreed.

Archivist and cataloguer

Remote · Ongoing, flexible

The part nobody photographs: naming, tagging, checking metadata and making sure a recording can be found again in ten years. If this sounds satisfying rather than tedious, we want to hear from you.

Researcher

Remote · Project by project

Background reading, source checking and tracking down existing scholarship so that field time is not spent recording what is already well recorded.

Guide and host

Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral · Seasonal

For people from the valleys who guide, drive, cook or host. Our trips are built around local operators and we are always looking to widen that network.

Nothing here fits but you still want to help? Write anyway and say what you can do. Small organisations find room for useful people.

Write to us about volunteering

Partner

For institutions and organisations

We work with universities, museums, language institutes, funders and responsible travel operators. What that looks like depends entirely on what you do: joint fieldwork, hosting part of the archive, funding a recording season, or sending students who will be useful rather than observing.

Two conditions apply to every partnership. Material stays under the consent terms it was collected under, and the community it came from keeps a copy and a say. Beyond that we are flexible.

Start a conversation →

Fund

Pay for the unglamorous half

Recorders and microphones. Hard drives, in duplicate, because a single copy is not an archive. Fuel to get up a valley. Transcription hours. A fair day rate for the guides and interpreters without whom none of it happens.

None of that is expensive by the standards of heritage work, and all of it is the difference between a plan and a recording.

Support the work