Professional Development Pilot (2024)
Bridge to Publishing’s inaugural storytelling initiative is a free professional development pilot program for Indigenous youth. Running from January - June 2024, this six-month online learning program connects young storytellers to careers in publishing through skill development activities and teachings rooted in community, culture, and tradition.
Program overview:
Foundational Unit
Grounded in Elder-guided teachings, this unit delves into the importance of storytelling to Indigenous identity and culture. It covers past, present, and future Indigenous storytelling forms and functions; addresses the harms of eurocentrism in Canadian publishing; and provides tools to support collaboration on a path to narrative reclamation and sovereignty.
Paid Internships:
Training Unit
This unit was created in collaboration with Indigenous and allied artists and storytelling professionals and includes learning materials and activities focused on publishing basics, nonfiction writing, creative writing, editing and digital storytelling.
Practical Unit
In this unit youth program participants will apply their newly developed skills to ongoing publishing manuscripts and receive professional feedback on their contributions.
In an effort to offer participants the opportunity to build industry connections and further develop their skills, all youth who complete the pilot will be eligible to receive a paid internship with one of our partnering publishers or a related storytelling organization in the Atlantic region. Additionally, each intern will receive ongoing support from the program’s mentors for the duration of their internship.
Program highlights
-
Our pilot received even more youth interest than we had anticipated. We opened applications mid-fall, 2023, with a goal of enrolling twelve learners. Demand was so high that by November we had to close applications. We currently have 23 youth from across all four Atlantic provinces enrolled in our pilot. We have a growing waitlist for our next round and are working hard to find ways to bring this program to more young storytellers.
-
Empowering youth through written and other creative activities is an important element of the pilot. One of our favourite pilot milestones was when we began to receive storytelling submissions from the enrolled youth. There is immense heart, healing, depth, and creativity in their storytelling works, and we have been inspired over and over by both their true and imagined stories. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for these accomplished young storytellers.
-
Throughout the pilot we have received plenty of positive youth feedback. Enrolled youth have repeatedly shared how important and necessary they feel the program is and how it’s teachings and activities— especially those that are Elder-guided— have made a lasting impact on their creativity, confidence, and overall storytelling skills. This is why we do what we do!
