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 three-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.
Methodology
This initiative integrated:
• Positive Youth Development (PYD) practices
• Behavioral-science-informed engagement
• Youth-led narrative co-creation
• Longitudinal cohort-based facilitation
• Mentorship capacity building
• Community-level social marketing
• Narrative film production and interview-based content
Scholars were not filmed as subjects.
They were guided through structured reflection, skill-building, and story development — transforming lived experience into peer-facing narrative assets.
The filmmaking process itself functioned as a developmental intervention for the participants.
Participants explored:
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
