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Scholarship · Solidarity Pathway

The Manas ki Jaat Solidarity Scholarship.

A funded scholarship pathway for non-Sikh young people whose participation in cohort, exchange, and field-service programmes has been structurally constrained — by community, by circumstance, or by both. Embodies a working line: Manas ki jaat sabai eko pehchanbo. There is one human caste, and our programmes belong to it.

ਮਾਨਸ ਕੀ ਜਾਤ ਸਬੈ ਏਕੈ ਪਹਿਚਾਨਬੋ

Manas ki jaat sabai eko pehchanbo.

Recognise all of humanity as a single caste.

— Guru Gobind Singh · The working principle of the scholarship

I. Why This Scholarship Exists

The Sikh tradition's most direct ethical claim about human equality is the line above, written by the Tenth Master in the seventeenth century. Manas ki jaat — the human caste — is one. Every claim of birth-superiority, every gatekept inheritance, every social architecture built on hierarchy of birth runs against the working scripture of our tradition. We do not always live up to it. The scripture stands regardless.

The Solidarity Scholarship is one institutional response to that scripture. Not the only response, and not a sufficient one — institutional responses to deep structural inequity rarely are. But a real one, in writing, with funded places, in cohorts that mix Sikh and non-Sikh participants who would not, in the ordinary course of their lives, have shared a roof, a kitchen, or a year of work together. The scholarship exists because Manas ki Jaat is the scripture, and a scripture that has not been institutionally implemented is, in some sense, a scripture not yet taken seriously.

II. Who This Is For

The Solidarity Scholarship is open to non-Sikh young people whose participation in cohort, exchange, and field-service programmes has been structurally constrained — by social structure, historical inheritance, geography, current circumstance, family resource, or compounding personal circumstance.

The scripture that names this scholarship does not enumerate categories. It refuses categorical hierarchy as such. A scholarship rooted in Manas ki jaat sabai eko pehchanbo should, in its own architecture, operate from honest judgement about real lives rather than from a list of who counts. The interpretive work belongs to the institution and the selection panel — not to the applicant.

What the working principle covers, by way of illustration rather than test:

Community-Rooted Under-Representation

In India: applicants from Dalit, Adivasi, OBC, and minority-religion communities; from communities historically excluded by caste, religious minority status, or both; from manual-scavenging-community lineages and other particular caste-occupational histories; from rural and small-town geographies thinner in access than urban India; from refugee, displaced, or border-region communities — including Tibetan, Rohingya, Burmese, and Sri Lankan refugee communities, as well as communities affected by long-running agrarian distress; from devadasi-descended communities and others whose specific historical disadvantage has rarely been named in mainstream institutional spaces.

Internationally: applicants from Black and African-diaspora communities; indigenous and First-Nations communities; Muslim minorities in Europe and the Americas where minority status compounds with class barriers; refugee and displaced communities, including Syrian, Yemeni, Afghan, and Ukrainian refugee young people; traveller and Roma communities in Europe; climate-displaced communities, particularly from low-lying island nations and rapidly-changing coastal geographies; stateless persons; and other communities whose access to international cohort, exchange, and field-service programmes has been structurally constrained.

Individual Circumstance

Applicants whose participation has been structurally constrained by their own life circumstance, even where their wider community is not under-represented in obvious ways. This includes — by way of illustration — applicants with significant disability whose family resources have been heavily directed toward medical and care needs; care-leavers and applicants who aged out of state foster care; young single parents whose education was interrupted by early caregiving; LGBTQ+ applicants navigating reduced or absent family support; applicants in long-term recovery, with the structural barriers that follow; applicants from families shaped by long-term mental-health caregiving responsibility; first-generation applicants where no relative has previously sought higher education or international cohort participation; applicants whose families have faced sudden destitution through illness, displacement, or financial collapse; and applicants whose primary marginalisation is shaped by intersecting circumstances that no single community label adequately holds.

Compounding Circumstance

Many applicants' situations sit at the intersection — community-rooted disadvantage compounded by individual circumstance, or the reverse. The scholarship was built with these compounded situations especially in mind. We do not, in selection, treat compounding as a sum of disadvantages to be tallied. We treat it as a fuller picture of the structural texture an applicant's situation actually has.

Marginalisation is not something an applicant should have to prove

These descriptions are illustrative, not exhaustive, and not a test list. If you are uncertain whether your situation fits the scholarship, write to us — the conversation establishes the fit, not the list. We will not impose proof requirements; documentary evidence of disadvantage is itself a form of institutional violence we are not willing to inflict. The selection process is built around honest exploration, in dialogue, with institutional discretion held by people trained to do that work carefully.

III. What The Scholarship Covers

Solidarity Scholarship awards are full-cost. They cover what the standard Diaspora Scholarship covers at Band A — full tuition, full stipend, accommodation, meals, placement, mentorship, liaison, insurance, and certification — and additionally cover travel costs that the standard scholarship leaves to the applicant's family.

The scholarship is fully funded and there are no hidden costs. If a charge is not on this page or in your written offer, it does not exist. Personal incidentals and discretionary travel during the cohort remain the applicant's own responsibility, as for every other Sikhiyas participant.

IV. The Working Discipline

The scholarship operates on a working discipline that we hold strictly because the alternative — soft application of a difficult principle — is how solidarity programmes drift into tokenism. Five rules:

Full participation, not exhibition. Solidarity Scholarship participants are full Sikhiyas cohort members — placed in real field roles, mentored at the same ratios, evaluated on the same standards, eligible for the same continuing engagement after cohort close. They are not visiting representatives of their communities, not panel speakers brought in for diversity, and not narrative props for a programme story. They are participants, on the same footing as everyone else in the cohort.

Equality of voice in the room. What Solidarity participants notice, observe, and challenge in cohort discussions matters as much as what any other participant notices. Sometimes more. The mixed cohort design is not for their education — it is for everyone's. Sikh participants in Solidarity-mixed cohorts often report it as the most consequential year of their formation, precisely because the conversations that happen across difference do not happen in same-tradition rooms.

No representational burden. A Solidarity participant is not asked to speak for their community, explain its specificities to the rest of the cohort, or carry a curriculum-shaped role of "the Dalit voice" or "the Black voice" or "the Muslim voice" in cohort sessions. They are participants. If they choose to speak from their community position in a discussion, that is their choice. If they choose not to, that is equally welcomed. Cohort facilitators are trained to notice when representational burden is being placed on a participant — including by other participants — and to redirect.

Roots forward, in equal measure. Like all Friends & Allies, Solidarity participants are asked to bring their own tradition forward. A Catholic Dalit participant is the Catholic Dalit practitioner in the room. An Anishinaabe participant is the Anishinaabe practitioner. A Yazidi or Rohingya refugee participant is the practitioner of their tradition. The roots-forward discipline is the working architecture, and it is at least as important here as anywhere else in the threefold welcome.

Privacy of background. No public-facing communication uses a Solidarity participant's name, image, or community identity without separate written consent obtained directly from the participant, after cohort close, and renewable annually. We do not produce solidarity narratives, social-media stories, or fundraising appeals featuring our scholarship recipients. The work is the work; the dignity of the participant is not part of the institutional marketing.

Underneath all five rules is the same principle that runs across Sikhiyas: the Solidarity place is an entrusted role, not a personal grant to be used as the recipient sees fit. The cohort seat, the field placement, the institutional standing, the credential at the end — all are authored by the institution and the tradition, and held by the participant under the contracted-role discipline that applies to every Sikhiyas placement. The entrusting is what makes the seat meaningful, and what makes the relationship between the recipient and the wider cohort genuine rather than transactional. The home page and the Seva Placements page set out this principle in its full form.

V. Cohort Sizes & Numbers

The Solidarity Scholarship awards a small number of places each cycle, deliberately. We hold the numbers small for two reasons. First, because doing solidarity well at a small scale is harder, and we are unwilling to do it badly at a larger scale. Second, because growth of the scholarship is paced to the institutional readiness of the cohort and mentor team to hold solidarity participation with real care — and that readiness develops over years, not over fundraising cycles.

This means roughly 6–10 Solidarity Scholarship places across the year. We expect this to grow modestly over the coming cycles as the cohort architecture matures. We have no target ratio for the scholarship as a percentage of overall cohort and we will not publish one — the right number is whatever number produces full, dignified, mutual cohorts each year.

VI. The Application Process

The Solidarity application process is the same seven-stage intake as every other Sikhiyas cohort, with three structural adjustments:

  1. Parallel routing. The application is held by the Scholarships & Awards Office (scholarships@sikhiyas.org), not the Diaspora Office, and is reviewed by a separate selection panel that includes external community-organisation members alongside Sikhiyas Directors.
  2. Anchoring reference. One of the two written references must come from someone in the applicant's institutional landscape who knows the application and can be in conversation about post-cohort re-entry. This may be a community-rooted organisation, civil-society institution, school or college mentor, social worker, support-services practitioner, faith leader, recovery-programme sponsor, or recognised practitioner in the applicant's community or circumstance. This is not a gatekeeping requirement; it is a relationship-building one. We are checking that the applicant has someone holding their longer arc, not testing the applicant for community standing.
  3. Re-entry conversation at offer stage. The written offer for a Solidarity place includes a structured re-entry-planning conversation between the participant, the Sikhiyas team, and the referring community organisation. The aim is to ensure the cohort experience strengthens the participant's standing in their home institutional landscape rather than disorienting them on return.

All other elements of the seven-stage intake — the first conversation, the written application, the selection interview, the offer, the pre-departure orientation, the arrival — proceed as for any other cohort. See the Scholarship Details page for the full timeline.

VII. The Reciprocity

The Solidarity Scholarship is funded by Sikhiyas through the standard fee economics of the cohort programmes — meaning, structurally, the families paying the standard Diaspora Scholarship rates contribute, alongside the implementing partners, to the scholarship places that allow Solidarity participants to attend. This is named here directly because we believe naming it is part of the work.

The reciprocity is real. Sikh participants in mixed cohorts encounter, at close range, the lived realities of communities whose history and present circumstance are not theirs. Sikh institutions, over time, are deepened by the relationships that form. The diaspora families paying full fees are, in effect, doing a version of Vand Chhako at the institutional level — sharing, through the scholarship, what their families' resources have been able to gather. None of this is forced or moralised. It is simply how the architecture works.

For Solidarity participants, the reciprocity is the standing invitation — formal and informal — to engage with Sikhiyas as long-term Friends & Allies after cohort close, to host visiting Sikhiyas cohorts in your own community when geography and capacity permit, and to bring your own community's institutional partners into the GlobalPEACE constellation if mutual interest develops over time.

VIII. What This Scholarship Is Not

IX. A Final Note

The line that names this scholarship — Manas ki jaat sabai eko pehchanbo — was written when caste hierarchy was the operating logic of the society around its author. It remains, in many of the geographies our applicants come from, the operating logic. The scripture is older than the problem it speaks to is solved, and our scholarship is one small institutional gesture in a much longer reckoning.

We do not propose that this programme repairs that reckoning. We propose that it is one honest attempt at not being part of the failure to repair it. The young people who arrive on Solidarity Scholarship places carry their own histories, their own communities, their own work. Our job is to receive them well, to give them the genuine cohort experience that any other applicant receives, and to walk alongside the longer work each of them will go on to do in their own contexts.

Begin a Solidarity application

Held by the Scholarships & Awards Office. The first conversation is exploratory. There is no fee at any stage of the application.

Scholarships Office Friends & Allies