During our time with Launch, we had the opportunity to participate in a storytelling training delivered by Tracy DeLuca from How Might We Design. This training gave us learnings and insights that we carried through to our pitch on Demo Day—the final presentation that signaled the completion of our time in the Launch Accelerator.
Refining Our Approach by Centering Our Audience
Storytelling has always been very important to us as an organization. As part of our work at the Reproductive Health Equity Project (RHEP) for Foster Youth, we do our best to center and share youth voices through different channels, such as blogs, social media campaigns, and our youth-led podcast, Self-Taught. However, the Launch training really helped us expand our storytelling skills and take the stories that we share to the next level.
The facilitator for the training encouraged us to think carefully about our audience and the result we were trying to achieve by telling our story. In other words, how could we tell the story in a way that impacts our audience and encourages them to take action?
In our case, our audience was social workers. In California, they are critical to the process of getting foster youth connected with sexual health education and supporting youth in accessing sexual and reproductive health services. We wanted to tell a story that highlights how their role impacts outcomes for young people, as well as provide them with an action to take—to connect youth on their caseload to our program.
Crafting A Story
During the Launch training, we created a story about a foster youth named Suzie. Suzie, a pregnant teen in foster care, did not have access to sexual health education and faced negative health outcomes, including an unhealthy relationship and an STI diagnosis that threatened the health of both her and her baby.
We created Suzie’s story by combining various lived experiences that young people in foster care shared with us through focus groups, podcast episodes, and other avenues. While Suzie is not a real person, her experiences and story are very real.
When tasked with creating our Demo Day pitch, we felt confident that we should include Suzie’s story to help illustrate the need for our innovation—Teen Talk Foster Youth, a sexual health education program specifically designed for young people in the foster system. By sharing Suzie’s story and referencing it throughout the presentation, we were able to cultivate empathy in our audience and explain how our solution could have made a difference in her life.
Unique Considerations for Sharing Foster Youth’s Stories
This type of storytelling feels particularly impactful when it comes to uplifting the stories of youth in foster care because it allows us to highlight the various barriers that youth face, including inadequate healthcare and lack of access to sexual health education and information. Stories can help people understand the intersectional identities of youth in foster care, as well as the various types of oppressions that impact their health and well-being.
However, there are specific considerations and challenges we must navigate when creating and sharing stories about foster youth. Each young person’s experience in the system is markedly different; for example, they could be living with extended family in kinship care, in a group home, or with foster parents who are strangers to them. They have entered the foster care system at different ages and under different circumstances. We must find a way to share stories that honor these diverse experiences while also creating stories that have an impact.
In addition, it’s deeply important to us that we protect the privacy of youth and only share information that they are comfortable with. We have found ways to anonymize stories while still maintaining specific details that help stories to feel relevant and relatable. For example, our team has been working on visual storytelling, using visuals without names or faces to preserve confidentiality.
Finally, and most importantly, we want to make sure any stories we share are empowering for foster youth. Although we cannot ignore that many youth in foster care face extremely difficult challenges, we try to end on a hopeful, uplifting note that highlights their strengths and passions and shows that their future is bright.
Next Steps
Our time with Launch enabled us to hire one of our Youth Advisory Board members, Mariah, as an intern for this work. As a former foster youth, Mariah was able to place her story front and center in our design process. Her input helped us to think beyond approaches we normally would have considered.
We also spent time during Launch working on our facilitator guide, which is designed for sexual health educators. The guide provides context and specific considerations to keep in mind when working with youth in foster care, as well as youth stories. We look forward to continuing to gather feedback on and refining our facilitator guide, and we will continue to share impactful stories like Suzie’s.