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Tuesday, February 19, 2013
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Movie theatre on the cutting room floor Nick Bekolay
THE CHRONICLE
Project REEL Life (PRL) is fast approaching its first post-makeover public appearance. Cinema is still a key feature of the project, but a youth-run theatre is no longer featured on PRL’s list of objectives. Under new guidance from Bill Ta y l o r, L a d y s m i t h S e c o n d a r y School’s drama and English teacher, PRL will now focus on mentoring community youth through the process of producing their own media projects. The implementation of the new version of PRL involves “a paradigm shift in how one thinks about projects in education,” Taylor said. “We’re moving from a site-based, time-based model to a virtual model that can then accommodate a flexibility in terms of time, place and mentorship. The original model for Project REEL Life was that the youth would build and run a theatre, which was a really cool idea. It involved entrepreneurship. It involved skill building in terms of setting budgets. They found a need in the town for youth to be engaged, and they were working toward providing a space for youth to congregate. It was a very cool project.” PRL received $200,000 from the Community Action Initiative (CAI) to make that happen, Taylor added, but the project stalled when it “hit road blocks that weren’t apparent to them when they started.” By December 2012, PRL was on LINDSAY CHUNG/CHRONICLE the verge of collapse. As the project Marcy Drinkwater and her daughter Delilah, who is one and a half years old, get in the Valentine’s spirit floundered, participating members by making Valentine’s Day-themed crafts during a Ladysmith Family and Friends session at Aggie Hall last called a meeting to discuss how they week. might salvage the project and retain
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the grant they’d received from CAI. “I went to the meeting and proposed a new vision [for the project] that I thought would be really great,” Taylor said, “and that’s to have the youth create a media product. The idea would be for youth to tell their stories and the stories they find in their community.” Discrepancies in how the project’s budget was being managed led to the resignation, in January, of James Latour, PRL’s former project manager. Taylor stepped in to fill the void as PRL shifted its focus towards empowering youth through storytelling. “Narrative therapy,” as Taylor referred to it, has proven itself to be an effective means of intervening in the lives of at-risk-youth, he said. As participants craft their stories, it provides them with an opportunity to perceive their own lives as stories they themselves are the authors of. Students then recognize that they are capable of determining the narrative governing their own lives. “That alone is an intervention,” Taylor added. Choosing, instead, to narrate someone else’s story offers advantages of its own. “That builds community right away,” Taylor said. “In the new incarnation of the project, it might be as simple as having a [participant] tell a community member’s story or a place’s story or a group’s story. Think of it like a virtual library that will help youth [better] understand their community.” Key to the project’s success will be its ability to help youth address feelings or emotions that arise from their storytelling projects, especially those that are autobiographical in See Community Page 3
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