What’s Working: Engaging Stories
This post continues our series to showcase our learnings in a multi-year campaign titled What’s Working, a Lilly Endowment Inc.– supported project to discover how faith-based organizations are working to engage Gen Z. Over the course of 2024, we’ll visit organizations across the country that are revamping traditional methods and innovating new ways to connect with and support the flourishing of young people. Here, we showcase Engaging Stories, a week-long retreat for Latino/a youth to explore the intersections of identity and faith.
On a warm Thursday morning in June, Viviana Soya was already hard at work.
As an intern for Engaging Stories, the 20-year-old youth pastor was responsible for assigning groups of Latinx students to their respective community service sites. On this day, she was overseeing her own group working on a Habitat for Humanity construction build. Viviana was once a participant at Engaging Stories, a weeklong faith retreat for Latino/a teens held at Lewis University.
Now, after five years of working her way from being a first-year participant to a small-group leader to an intern, she takes great pride in being able to shape the experience for students.
“A lot of the small-group leaders come up and we’ll talk and gush about the first-year participants,” Viviana says. “They’ll say, ‘I love my kids so much. I am so excited. Guess what they told me? They’re sharing these things with me and they’re opening up to me and they’re letting themselves feel and express however it is if they want to.’ [As a leader], I love having other teens come up to me. There’s so much love here, and I love being able to provide that for other jovenes.”
Viviana represents the exact outcomes the founders of Engaging Stories hope for—an experience in “everyday theology” where the participants eventually become the leaders. Juan Escarfuller, Executive Director of Instituto Fe y Vida, the organization that leads Engaging Stories, says the idea is to empower Latino/a teens to guide their own human development and faith formation.
“So, if you look at the experience, you’re going to see 16, 17, 18-year-old Latinos who are being facilitated by 17, 18, 19, 20-year-old Latinos who were just in the program a year before,” Juan says. “[The students think] ‘If I see someone like me who was just here a year ago, I’m like, ‘Whoa, maybe I can do that too.’… And the most powerful thing for me in including and centering the experiences of young Latinos, not just in the participant chair but even in the facilitator chair, is the fact that we do this as a community. What we have found because of this model [is that] it’s a pipeline model of leadership, and how you give
back—[how you] pay it forward after you take the program—is that . . . the team welcomes those who want to come back as leaders.”
Participants quickly realize that each moment of the weeklong experience is curated: serving and working in the community in the morning, exploring theology and discovering its connection to self and community in the afternoon, and fun and fellowship in the evening. Viviana recalls that she had never been away from home that long before, but she loved being in a space where she could relate so deeply to those around her.
“I loved being in a community where we all share a faith and our culture as well, and being the main characters there—we were the reason that this was happening,” Viviana says. “Being part of a space where los jovenes son los protagonistas is just amazing because somos jovenes and people expect us to be a certain way, act a certain way, but yet they kind of also judge us. And so being in a space where you are just free to be you, to be young, to celebrate your culture is beautiful, and it’s so empowering. I think everybody deserves to be in a space like that because we all should all be able to celebrate who we are and celebrate with each other and lift each other up.”
The students at Engaging Stories showcase the diversity of the Latino/a experience—those who are children of immigrants, those who are LGBTQ+, those who identify with the Black community in the US, and those who feel like outsiders in this country. Thus, the environment and its offerings are designed for people to explore their Latino/a identities and see how their faith integrates into their personal experience.
Juan recalls one student who was serving at a food pantry for his community service project. This student later shared with the group that he and his family had been the recipients of food pantry support during COVID when his parents lost their jobs.
“He talked about how he went from feeling immense shame about the particular circumstances and the poverty of his family to feeling immense gratitude for the fact that [his service in a food pantry] was part of a ministry, part of a sense of mission, part of a sense of building the kingdom of God,” Juan says. “It wasn’t just charity…but a real sense of addressing a need because there was dignity on both sides of that food pantry table. So, he talked about that when he went back. Now he’s really excited to support that ministry. From his own experience, it’s like he had an epiphany, an ‘aha! moment’ where he could go from, ‘I don’t want to touch that. I can’t talk about that because it’s wrapped in so much hurt and so much vergüenza,’ the word for shame in Spanish, to all of a sudden wanting to do something about it—and not just individually, but at the level of social justice.”
While Engaging Stories is currently partially funded through a grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc., Juan says the program will continue thanks to a sustainability partnership
between Lewis University and Instituto Fe y Vida. The vision is to create a mobile version of the program to allow Latino/a youth to have the same experience in their own cities.
“That’s a tall order because this is done with excellence,” Juan says. “But fundamentally, our drive to make this local is because we believe teens can do it. We believe in our teens, and actually they eventually can even do it much better and surprise us beyond our wildest dreams by what they will do in the next generation with Engaging Stories.”
This site visit was made possible through a grant from Lilly Foundation, Inc. Watch for future blogs recapping our site visits that show What’s Working.
