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 Simulation (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 Simulation
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 the simulation 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.
When it really works, the community you make in the simulation will continue these conversations for months or years to come. Experience –> Diagnose –> Repair –> Iterate –> Share
Youth Experiential Learning Simulation (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.