Your experience may challenge what people think they know about you.

It appears in headlines when something terrible happens. It becomes a number in a report. Communities are described through broad labels, and assumptions are repeated about what their members believe, fear, experience, or want.

But real lives are more complicated.

Two people from the same religion, ethnic community, region, gender identity, or family background may experience the same society very differently. One person may feel deeply at home while another feels excluded. Someone may remember discrimination; someone else may remember solidarity. People stay, leave, return, fall in love, raise families, practice faith, question faith, change beliefs, build careers, lose opportunities, encounter prejudice, find acceptance, and make lives that rarely fit neatly into a category.

Minority Pulse exists to make room for that diversity and complexity. We want to create a space where no community is reduced to a single identity, a single incident, or a single story. Even within the same community, people may experience belonging, exclusion, faith, doubt, friendship, discrimination, acceptance, fear, hope, and opportunity in very different ways. Minority Pulse aims to make those differences visible by letting people describe their lives in their own words.

Why do individual stories matter?

Stereotypes grow when people are treated as categories instead of individuals. They can flatten entire communities into a few assumptions: that everyone thinks alike, has suffered in the same way, supports the same politics, follows the same traditions, or wants the same future.

Those assumptions are not harmless.

They can influence how neighbors treat one another, how communities are portrayed, how journalists tell stories, how researchers describe people, and how policies are designed.

Minority Pulse aims to bring together many different voices so that no single incident, political narrative, stereotype, or outside interpretation is allowed to stand in for an entire community.

Your experience may confirm something others have experienced. It may also challenge what people think they know about you. Both matter.

Your story does not have to be dramatic.

You do not need to have experienced violence, persecution, or a major public event to contribute.

Write about your everyday life. If you want to write about a major event, you are of course welcome to do so. But we also want to hear about you: where you feel at home or out of place, friendship, family, love, marriage, faith, doubt, education, work, migration, identity, discrimination, acceptance, fear, humor, opportunity, disappointment, resilience, and the places where you find hope.

Sometimes the most revealing story is simply: This is what life is like for me.

What can your story contribute?

One story helps us understand one life. Many stories, considered carefully together, can reveal patterns that statistics, news reports, and public debates often miss. Just as importantly, they can reveal differences within communities and challenge stereotypes that survive because those differences are rarely heard.

Over time, Minority Pulse hopes to build a richer picture of experiences connected to Bangladesh: not one official story and not one story for each community, but many individual accounts told in people’s own words.

A note about the word ‘minority’

We know that not everyone described as a ‘minority’ identifies with that word. The distinction between majority and minority can oversimplify identities, histories, relationships, and differences in power.

A person may identify as Indigenous, Adivasi, marginalized, displaced, secular, nonreligious, gender-diverse, or in another way entirely. Others may prefer none of these labels.

We use Minority Pulse as the name of this platform, not as a label that anyone must accept for themselves.

We want to understand where people feel they belong, where they feel excluded or overlooked, how they live with and understand their identities, and how differences in power and opportunity shape their lives.

You define yourself. We want to hear your experience.

What happens after you share?

Your full submission will not be published automatically.

It will first be stored privately and reviewed with attention to privacy and identifying information. During the beta, stories will be examined together to understand recurring experiences, important differences, and emerging themes.

In the future, de-identified patterns, research findings, and carefully selected excerpts may contribute to public understanding, journalism, research, policy conversations, and community dialogue.

We may also feature short anonymous excerpts on Minority Pulse so that visitors can hear what others are experiencing, recognize shared experiences, encounter different perspectives, and feel encouraged to tell their own stories.

This will always be optional.

At the end of your submission, you will be asked separately whether you give permission for Minority Pulse to publish a short anonymous excerpt from your story. If you choose No, your story will remain private and will not be used as a public excerpt. If you choose Yes, we may select a short passage and remove identifying details before publishing it. Your name will not be attached. Your choice about public sharing will not affect whether your story is included in the project.

No single submission will be treated as representing an entire community. And you decide how much you want to share.

Skip anything you do not want to answer. Share as much or as little as you choose.