StoryLiving
Enabling youth with developmental disabilities & mental health disorders to share their COVID-19 experiences through digital storytelling
The project StoryLiving – Enabling youth with developmental disabilities & mental health disorders to share their COVID-19 experiences through digital storytelling (Erasmus + KA2: Strategic Partnership | Youth) aims at overcoming the challenges that youth with developmental disabilities & mental health disorders faced during the pandemic of COVID-19 through the use of digital storytelling.
StoryLiving supports storytelling as a method for overcoming and process emotions, fears, traumas and isolation and for sustaining the healing process of youth and their families.
StoryLiving objectives are:
To help youth with ASD/ mental health disorders cope with the pandemic;
To support youth trainers, educators and social workers and increase their capacity to use storytelling in their work;
To promote social inclusion of youth with ASD/ mental health disorders through storytelling;
To raise awareness about the special issues that people with ASD / mental health disorders face during the pandemic.
Activities
The consortium conducted a research to identify good practices in the use of digital storytelling and other practices of inclusion adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The research helped in developing guidelines and practical strategies for institutions and organisations working with youth living with ASD and other mental health disorders to support them in adopting digital storytelling as a communication and healing tool.
The guidelines and practical strategies constituted the content of a training course for educators, social workers, and youth workers, that work with this target. The trained professional involved at least 2 young people living with ASD and other mental health disorders and they collected their stories through the learned methodology. An online learning and hosting platform has been developed including the training modules and the collected stories, and it will allow users to upload their own digital stories. In the end, all partners developed a recommendations papers at a national and European level to promote the use of storytelling.
Resources
Training program on the storytelling methodology for youth workers, educators and social workers working with youth with developmental disabilities/ mental health disorders.
Piloting & Development of collective stories by youth with developmental disabilities/ mental health disorders.
Development of the training & hosting platform
Recommendations & Guidelines on using storytelling as a communication and healing process during & after the pandemic