I think a lot of people, when they think about justice impacted communities, or the school-to-prison pipeline, they immediately think that it's something scary when really just another story that gets told.

Who would like to give it a shot?

It is not accurate most of the time.

When we bring our kids into the space and we let them say for themselves who they are, what their stories are, who they're going to be, and what their communities are to them, it's just, its magic.

They are truly, truly brilliant individuals.

The Brink Literacy Project is a storytelling nonprofit, and what we do is we use the act of telling your story to change lives, and our focus is on the prison pipeline.

So we work in youth preventative work, in facility and reentry.

So we're seeing what he's seeing.

This space definitely taught me a lot about self education, and that just honestly came from us just writing down so much.

When you're able to get it down in other ways than just speaking, there's like power in that.

The class that we're teaching here today is our Frames Youth Program, specifically our Frames Masters Comics Course.

So the students have been working with us since the summer.

We use comics to explore deeper issues and figure out what narratives we tell ourselves and in our communities.

I want us to actually try something new to get us in the mode of thinking today.

The students are working to write their stories for publication.

When they asked what story do you want to do, I already immediately knew what story I was going to do.

So the character is 14 years old.

Young.

Hes just, he loves to explore.

Its around that time I involved myself in a lot of things.

And 14 was the age where I transitioned my perspective of life.

So I chose that.

By focusing in on a turning point in their lives, we're also doing really sneaky therapy, so we're digging into these really important past events and we're telling stories around them as a way to solidify positive narratives, discard the really negative narratives.

And it allows us to feel really passionate, excited and ready to take those steps forward.

Once we start working on that in a kind of third-person perspective, not, oh, tell me about this horrible thing you went through, but what did that character do in that moment?

How do we conceive of that character?

How does the rest of the audience feel when this character is going through all of these things?

We start to be able to empathize with each other and with ourselves in a way that a lot of people haven't been able to do before.

We have a lot of these experiences that we're not really that proud about, but we start to realize that, I mean, if we want people to understand us, and like really know who we are on the inside that we kind of got to get vulnerable.

They let us be ourselves, and once one person feels the comfort to, you know, be quirky or just be themselves, I think it's a very contagious feeling.

Those details is what's going to draw out that emotion.

We all need steps to really execute on what we want out of this life.

Seeing like the building blocks you have to take to get there is what it really showed me.

Like, yeah, I want this big world of mine, but how do we get there?

They are young and have every single opportunity ahead of them.

To provide a space where they can dive into that, it has gone from what story do you tell yourself and how do you think about it, to how does that story impact your future?