The Future of Young Storytellers: Our Strategic Plan
Young Storytellers imagines a future built on empathy and equity, where young people are empowered to share their individual stories and raise the voices of those who don’t often get heard.
The pandemic provided our organization an opportunity to slow down and check-in with our values, systems, and goals for the future. We took time to adapt to the changing world and reinforced our programs with educational expertise and a DEIB/AR lens. Ultimately, we emerged with a clear understanding of where and how we can make an impact on young people locally and nationally. It was important for our organization to get specific about how we can honor our history of success and create a legacy of significance.
PC: Ed Hidalgo
Throughout 2022, Young Storytellers collaborated with Freedom Verses in the creation of a Strategic Plan for the next three years. Our consultants at Freedom Verses helped center the strategic planning in an equitable process that allowed for collaboration and feedback from all corners of the Young Storytellers community. What began as a series of meetings, activities, and workshops for our staff and board, resulted in a comprehensive living document that has been integrated into all team operations.
The next 3 years of Young Storytellers are all about bolstering and expanding. As we look to drive the next 25 years of impact, we have identified 3 value-driven strategic directions:
We aim to focus the number of direct service programs we provide each school year to ensure high-quality programming and rebuild a robust volunteer community.
We will establish a school selection criteria to drive maximum impact in historically marginalized and under-resourced communities.
We will create storytelling toolkits and resources to be used by communities nationwide.
These efforts will ensure the success of our programs, engage a broader audience, and increase our organizational sustainability. While these may seem to be big directions, we have broken them down into smaller action items that team members complete and review quarterly. In this way, we are able to focus our day-to-day efforts in pursuit of a common goal.
This process has also helped us identify what we need as an organization to move forward under the Strategic Plan. Locally, we seek volunteer mentors and actors - especially Gen Z & BIPOC individuals - to continue enriching our programs and providing support for our student writers. Nationally, we are looking to find youth-serving organizations that might be interested in being trained to bring our programs to their communities. In addition to securing growth funding, this will enable us to bring our mission to students and schools across the country.
You can read more about the history of our organization and the narrative of the plan here, and you can view the plan in its entirety here.
