NORTHWELL HEALTH
Northwell Community Scholars
Longitudinal Strategic Storytelling & Youth Development Partnership (2023–Present)
Since 2023, we’ve partnered with Northwell Health to design and implement a multi-year storytelling and youth-development framework that strengthens scholar readiness, boosts mentorship impact, and builds durable narrative infrastructure across cohorts.
Rather than creating typical awareness content, the partnership positions scholars as peer-facing experts — embedding behavioral science, mental-wellness frameworks, and narrative co-creation into the program’s core.
Scope
Over three consecutive cohorts, this partnership has included:
• Multi-month behavioral science–informed workshop series
• Integration of Readiness Mindsets and coping frameworks
• Curriculum design supporting social and emotional well-being
• Positive Youth Development mentor training
• Documentary film production (Year One)
• Three narrative short films addressing first-generation challenges (Year Two)
• Social media campaign and digital dissemination strategy
• Theatrical and organizational premiere events
• Shorty Impact Award recognition
• Three additional narrative films in development (Year Three)
• Creation of reusable curriculum and content tools for future cohorts
Not a production engagement — a longitudinal partnership.
Mentorship Integration
Northwell Community Scholars pairs students with professional mentors across the health system.
Northwell Community Scholars illustrates our approach to strategic storytelling:
One implementation.
Multiple layers of return.
Serving youth development, mentorship capacity, institutional credibility, and long-term narrative infrastructure — within a single, integrated system.
Shorty Impact Award Recognition
The work we developed with Northwell Community Scholars was recognized at the 10th Annual Shorty Impact Awards, which honor impactful storytelling and media across the social and digital landscape.
What made this recognition meaningful is not just the award itself, but what it reflects:
Young people were not positioned as subjects of the work—they were collaborators in it.
First-generation teens across Long Island developed and produced three short films based on their own experiences—navigating pressure, identity, and expectation. These weren’t abstract themes; they were lived realities, translated into stories designed to reach and resonate with their peers.
The Shorty Awards evaluate work based on creativity, strategy, execution, and impact. This recognition affirms something we see consistently:
When young people are supported in articulating their own experiences, the result is work that carries a level of clarity and credibility that is difficult to manufacture.
Methodology
A combination of positive Youth Development (PYD) practices such as exploratory psycho-educational practices to identify population-specific social and personal barriers & solutions that act as both formative research for narrative story building as well as exercises that increase self-efficacy.
• Behavioral-science-informed engagement
• Longitudinal cohort-based facilitation
• Mentorship capacity building
• Community-level social marketing
• Narrative and interview-based content
Scholars are not filmed as subjects.
They are guided through structured reflection, skill-building, and story development — transforming lived experience into peer-facing narrative assets.
The filmmaking process itself functions as a developmental intervention for the participants.
Participants explore:
• First-generation specific barriers such as help-seeking
• Career autonomy and cultural expectations
• Mental health stigma among young men
• Social media pressure and dopamine-seeking behavior
• Emotional regulation and decision-making
The result: internal skill development paired with high quality external campaign content.
Impact
Organizational Impact
• Built a scalable youth storytelling architecture
• Strengthened alignment between equity mission & youth voice
• Created reusable well-being curriculum tools
• Expanded peer-facing content library
• Elevated mentorship visibility and cohesion
• Demonstrated multi-year narrative infrastructure development
Longitudinal Outcome:
A scalable storytelling + capacity-building system that strengthens youth resilience, enhances mentorship impact, and generates authentic, funder-ready content.
Youth-Level Impact
• Increased self-efficacy around help-seeking
• Increased confidence in career autonomy
• Improved emotional literacy and coping language
• Reinforced identity as capable, reflective leaders
• Strengthened peer-to-peer credibility through authorship
This engagement served scholars, mentors, administrators, and funders simultaneously.
We strengthened the mentorship model by:
• Delivering PYD training to mentors
• Aligning mentorship practices with behavioral science frameworks
• Elevating mentor-mentee relationships as central narrative themes
• Capturing joint interviews illustrating mentorship as a protective factor