Photo by Thomas Benedetti: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-man-is-being-lifted-up-by-his-friends-27905006/
Take a walk in my shoes / See what I see / Hear what I hear / Feel what I feel
There is a gap between what systems are intended to provide for young people and how youth actually experience those systems. This is especially true for youth in the foster care, juvenile justice, and homelessness systems, who frequently have to navigate myriad referrals, rules, cultures, and biases to access the services they need in education, social services, courts, behavioral health, employment, and more.
The Youth Experiential Learning Labs (YExLS) is an attempt to help bridge that gap. Developed by professionals who have worked in youth serving systems for decades in collaboration with youth with lived experience of those same systems and further refined through the participation and feedback of judges, social workers, teachers, probation officers, and more, YExLS seeks to help participants get a better sense of what it is like to be youth navigating public systems while also pursuing their own dreams, following their own interests, and surviving their own traumas.
We invite you to take a walk in our shoes so together, we can help build better solutions for and with children, youth, and families.
Participating in the Lab
YExLS is gamified but is not a game. During a two hour session, participants spend roughly half the time navigating the room, pursuing the interests and goals of their assigned character. Each participant’s experience in the simulation is unique. Like life, participants may find their way made easier or more complicated by their decisions or by chance.
The second half of is where we process, where we figure out what just happened, and where we start to game plan specific, real world solutions that we can take back with us to the real world.
While some YExLS consist only of those core components, others are built into all-day or multi-day lab sessions, designed to translate insight into impact. They may include:
- Organizational strategic planning
- Community priority setting and work planning
- Intensive substantive trainings on related topics, such as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), building community based therapeutic supports, substantive civil legal rights, and more.
- Trial advocacy skills for youth lawyers in partnership with the National Institute for Trial Advocacy (NITA).
When it really works, the community you make in the simulation will continue these conversations for months or years to come. Experience –> Diagnose –> Improve –> Iterate –> Share
Photo by Rebecca Zaal: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-taking-photo-764681/
Youth Experiential Learning Labs (YExLS) by the YExLS team is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://www.YExLS.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://yexls.com/provide-feedback/.
In My Shoes logo and design by artist and award winning comics creator Farel Dalrymple.