LPA-certified coach Deb Sakry Lande is a strategic communications consultant, leadership advisor and storyteller with extensive experience guiding people and organizations through transformation, innovation and growth. She is the founder of Stories with Intention and co-author of the book and quote cards, Universal Intentions.
The Story Starts with Home
A stable home is the foundation for everything else in life. Feeling safe, experiencing security, feeling the consistency and reliability of caring adults, knowing where you will sleep each night and feeling confident that you know where to find food when you are hungry are basic human needs. When these needs are not met, children can experience trauma. And, as they age, sometimes within the very systems that are intended to support them, young people learn they have to rely on themselves—their own personal power—to regain a sense of strength and resilience from within.
Recently, Deb Sakry Lande worked with a group of young men with lived experiences related to homelessness, the juvenile justice system and/or the child welfare system, using their personal narratives to explore resilience.
Lande used the LPA methodologies as participants developed and refined their personal stories for creative self-expression and advocacy. The LPA Story Map, Brief Brisk Advocacy Blueprint, Experience Arc and other tools form in Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Difference helped advance the young men’s understanding of advocacy as a way to both heal personally and create change in their communities.
“Change a perspective, change a life.”
That’s how one person in the workshop described an insight from the workshop. Lande agrees. She stated, “Young people are uniquely brilliant and creative. Storytelling work relies on trusting people and processes—both of which are not always a given in a young person’s life. I am honored to be a small part of elevating powerful young voices through coaching and storytelling in order to change the systems around them.”
At the end of the workshop series, program participants each developed a unique and specific representation of their stories, which included a speech, a photo/poem combination, a video, an expansion of an online platform and the vision for a fashion show.