Project YouthBuild (PYB) is an educational, occupational, and leadership program for young people with low incomes who have dropped out of school. The students, have suffered trauma and seek better futures that begin with earning a high school diploma while gaining jobs skills at PYB.

Working with the Project YouthBuild director and the Leadership Instructor, we identified the opportunity to facilitate a storytelling process for students to reflect on their resilience. Similar exercises, where students wrote about their experiences, were part of the approach teachers used to know more about their students, help them process challenging situations, and foster their skills to overcome these. Building upon the success of these exercises in the program, and using my previous experience designing a conversational methodology, I designed a set of three workshops called stories of Resilience and Change. 

Stories fo Resilience and Change uses storytelling to supports Project YouthBuild students to reflect on their past experiences and develop new narratives of resilience. In these narratives, they identify life lessons useful for them to face future challenges, but also that can serve as a model for others in their communities. As part of the workshop, students use ajournal to keep a record of their stories and reflections, and later share these with others.