ONE BOLD WEEK: Exploring our Storytelling Lab
Earlier this month, our annual 4-week summer program, One Bold Summer, kicked off bolder than ever - with a record-breaking number of youth enrolled, 37 so far!
On the first day alone, more than 20 youth walked through our doors! This milestone was a result of months of dedicated recruitment led by our committed Rainbow Labs team, and it made one thing clear: there is a growing and real need for safer, bolder spaces for LGBTQIA+ youth in the LA area.
Programmatically, the flow of OBS remained the same. Over the course of the month, youth participants dive into all of Rainbow Labs' core offerings, from Storytelling (Creative Arts) and Sports to Leadership and Innovation (STEM).
What was different this year is the scale and the opportunity for youth to receive an educational scholarship after successful completion. We also turned our office space into a full classroom, rows of desks led by a team of real-life Miss Frizzles, inspiring the next generation of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming community leaders.
Week 1: Storytelling
Kicking off our every-so-colorful summer program was our Storytelling Lab, facilitated by our ever-so-wonderful Program Coordinator, Andrea Montecinos-Padilla! Our creative arts program is always a favorite amongst our youth. As a starting point for programming, it anchors them in the warm waters of OBS, making it easier to dive in with curiosity and enthusiasm in the hope of finding the treasures of creativity! At the core of Storytelling, we always lead with the intention of creating a curriculum that freely compels our youth to tell their own stories through an artistic lens. Whether it’s collaging, sculpting, or combining mixed art media to convey their visual messaging, it's always interesting to see where their inspiration takes them! And that inspiration came in the form of a burst book.
A burst book is a mixed-media art piece that conveys an individual's story. As pitched, the cover is a reflection of the self, and what's beyond the pages is what people don't see, passions, fears, and everything else compiled together that makes you, YOU! With only a few cut-out booklets, crafting tools, and some old magazines, our one bold summer participants were LOCKED IN. Over three days of construction and illustration, with help from Rainbow Labs staff and our volunteer mentors for the week, our youth created something truly special that was authentically and individually their own.
And it wouldn’t be OBS without a field trip—and to further introduce them to innovative ways to tell their story, we leaned into storytelling through content creation with the help of our new friends at LatiNation!
LatiNation is a Latin-owned independent media company based in Los Angeles that features culture, entertainment, and news for the new generation of culture makers and story seekers!
And what better way to end our Storytelling week at OBS than to stop by their production studios! The day consisted of a panel led by storytellers and professional leads at LatiNation and Netflix that reminded our youth of the importance of hard work and where the magic of ambition and intentionality can inevitably lead you. We were even able to tour their studio spaces, where they shoot their content, and their operations area, where you could see everything in production. Followed by a presentation on content creation skills and structure, facilitated my social media staff at LatiNation. Towards the end of the trip, our OBS youth were able to film their own content in the LatiNation production space, featuring their Art projects from the week!
By bringing them to LatiNation, we wanted to cement further the power of storytelling and its potential for expansion. At the Lab, we of course open up our doors to LGBTQIA+ youth to exhale from the polluted air of bigotry and the interchangeable complexities that come with growing up, but we also want to show them ways their light can guide them through uncharted paths. Storytelling week was more than inspiring, but a reminder of how even the smallest amount of encouragement can lead to big, brave, and beautiful results for a young person’s life.
