Case Study: The Y.O.U.T.H. Training Project
Current and Former Foster Youth Offer Unique Tangible Help to Social Workers

Learn more about this project:
http://www.youthtrainingproject.org

The Y.O.U.T.H. Training Project, is a dynamic collaboration between current and former foster youth, social work professionals, social work training academies, foundations, and others committed to the empowerment and futures of California foster youth. This unique youth development effort, which is staffed almost entirely by former foster youth, has empowered more than forty youth to educate more than 3000 child welfare staff in California, Hawaii, and beyond about the needs of young people living in—and transitioning out of—foster care.

Beginning in 2002, the Project has collaborated with the Center on annual digital storytelling workshops, bringing together current and former foster youth from across California and Hawaii to share stories from their lives. For each four-day session (the longer workshop duration ensures that participants can delve deeply into difficult past experiences without feeling pressured by time constraints and demanding technology), former Y.O.U.T.H. storytellers are employed as assistant teachers on a multiracial training team, and Y.O.U.T.H. staff are present to provide support, encouragement, and guidance. Stories produced in the ten workshops held to date document the struggles that so many youth in care have endured: abuse by family members, foster parents, and the social services system itself, grief and loss, the daily grind of living in poverty. But these young people do not portray themselves as “victims”; rather, the stories highlight their resiliency, determination, pride, and hopes for the future.

The ultimate goals of the Y.O.U.T.H. Training Project are to build leadership among current and foster youth and to improve child welfare practice by providing resources and feedback to individual workers and supervisors. After the workshops, Y.O.U.T.H. staff work with the project’s Training Team of current and former foster youth to support them in developing and delivering trainings for child welfare and other adolescent providers, on issues facing youth in the foster care system. The Team is facilitated in a series of creative exercises that allow them to draw themes from the digital stories and design training activities.

This innovative, youth development and training-focused application of digital storytelling has served as a pioneering model for foster youth/social services focused digital storytelling projects that have emerged in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Los Angeles Counties in California, Yakima, Washington, and in the greater New York City area, including New Haven, Connecticut.