Inside Summer Stories 2025
Archiving Vulnerability
This summer, our Student Organizers built a space of color, creativity, and community care. Over five weeks, we painted, photographed, collaged, wrote, laughed, and dreamed together. This summer we created a collective masterpiece: the 2025 Summer Stories Zine!
Summer Stories is a space where young people can step into their power as storytellers, practice new skills, share their truths, and remind us that joy and justice are always linked. From bold brushstrokes to quiet reflections, every moment added up to something powerful, and every page of the zine holds a piece of that magic.
Week 1: Painting New Worlds 🌈🖌️
This image is of Summer Stories students proudly holding up their paintings from Week 1, standing together in a group and showcasing their artwork.
We kicked things off with Doula Lo, who guided us through creative envisioning and painting as a form of resistance and freedom. Students began with an Emotion Color Wheel to match colors to their feelings, and then used those colors to paint worlds where they could thrive. Youth created their own visions of liberation, belonging, and creativity made real on paper.
Our youth shared:
The art feelings wheel activity made me see my emotions differently.
I loved interacting with others and talking about our emotional colors. Seeing everyone else’s interpretations of feelings was so cool.
This kind of reflection shows the through line from Summer Stories to our campaign goals around Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and mental health. When students learn to understand their own emotions, it becomes easier to understand and care for others too.
This image is of Summer Stories students sitting in a circle during a workshop, with Doula Lo leading the session at the front of the room and introducing their activity.
This image is of Doula Lo and Summer Stories students smiling and holding up their finished paintings, celebrating their creative work.
Sneak Peek
This image is a sneak peek of art and poetry featured in The Summer Stories 2025 Zine!
Week 2: Capturing Stories Through Photography 📸✨
This image is a film photo of two students outdoors; one student looks away while the other stands with confidence, their arms linked together.
With our amazing teaching artist Brea, we stepped outside into the sun with film cameras in hand. Students learned about exposure, composition, and how photography can be a tool for storytelling. We experimented with framing, depth of field, and new perspectives, capturing the little moments of community all around us.
Favorite memories included “going outside and taking photos with everyone in the playground” and realizing that a camera lens can show truths that words sometimes can’t. Students took disposable cameras home to document their lives, turning everyday moments into works of art. These new ways of seeing through a lens also echo what community organizing teaches us: when you shift your perspective, you start to see possibilities for change everywhere.
Swipe through below to see the film photots we took that week!
Week 3: Collage as Action 🎨✂️
This image is of a collage made at Summer Stories 2025, featuring cut-out images of planets, a frog, a caterpillar, a spiral, and a student in motion layered over a scenic background.
Led by FEEST’s very own resident storyteller, Dev, this week was all about collage! Art that pushes boundaries, sparks imagination, and speaks up when words are hard to find. Students made “All About Me” collages with prompts like: a memory that shaped me, a part of me most people don’t see, and a vision of who I’m becoming. We then created art as action: pieces that linked identity to justice and creativity to collective power.
Youth described their experiences with excitement and honesty.
I had a lot of fun creating my collage, it was nice to just have time and space to try new art stuff.
Their reflections remind us that collage, like their words, shows how scraps, fragments, and layers can come together to form something whole. Just like movements for change.
Sneak Peek
This image is a sneak peek of art featured in The Summer Stories 2025 Zine!
Week 4: Poetry as Power ✍️🔥
This image is of the poetry book “Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky” by Rudy Francisco, featuring a bright yellow background, a large red balloon, and an illustrated figure holding onto the string while wearing a space helmet.
Teaching Artist and poet Nura brought the words and opened the door to poetry as liberation. Students explored free verse poetry with Rudy Francisco, and drew inspiration from Maya Angelou and other powerful voices, and then crafted their own poems. Together, we wrote, read, and shared: understanding that poetry can hold grief and joy, anger and hope, and still leave us stronger than before.
Writing together helped me express myself in a way I didn’t know I needed.
These moments show how creative expression connects directly to community. Finding your voice alongside others is the first step toward shaping the world we want to live in, together.
All students also got to take home their own copy of Excuse Me As I Kiss the Sky.
Sneak Peek
This image is a sneak peek of poetry featured in The Summer Stories 2025 Zine!
Week 5: Zine & Celebration Day 🎉📖
For our grand finale, we asked: Why don’t we make our own publication instead of waiting for someone else to tell our story? Students brainstormed themes, created pages, and laid everything out together. We shared dedications, wrote love notes to ourselves, and laughed as we pieced it all into one collective archive. We closed with cake, polaroids, and a sense of pride.
I loved making the zine from the first to the last page together with everyone. That was really cool – I’ve never done something like that before.
It was a powerful reminder that when youth create together, they are also practicing the same skills that fuel organizing: collaboration, vision, and collective power.
This image is of zine pages created by Summer Stories students, spread out across a table. The pages feature colorful collages, drawings, handwritten poems, and playful designs including flowers, cats, patterns, and layered cut-outs, showcasing each student’s unique style.
This image is of students co-creating the Summer Stories zine: a whiteboard titled ‘Zine Table of Contents’ covered in orange, blue, and yellow sticky notes. Each note lists story ideas.’ Two hands are seen adding a blue sticky note, capturing the collective process of shaping the zine.
This image is of colorful slices of layered cake from Cakes of Paradise
Beyond the Art: Skills & Growth 💡💬
Along the way, students strengthened many skills:
- 🎨 Trying new art techniques in painting, photography, collage, and poetry
- 💬 Sharing their ideas and stories with the group
- 🤝 Collaborating and supporting one another’s visions
- 🧠 Thinking critically and asking deep questions
- 🧭 Connecting art to activism and social justice
- 🪞 Learning more about themselves and their creative process
- 🌱 Practicing care for themselves and their peers
- 🗣 Building confidence in public speaking and leading
One student said, “I wish this summer could last forever.” And honestly, we feel the same. Every week deepened our trust and joy as a community, highlighting the ways that art and organizing feed each other.
Drumroll Please… The 2025 Summer Stories Zine! 🌟📚
All of this magic now lives inside our brand-new zine, a collective work of art filled with paintings, poems, collages, photos, and stories. This zine is a living archive of what we created together. Joyful, messy, beautiful, and unapologetically ours. We are so proud to be able to share it with you.
To every student who showed up with courage, curiosity, and creativity, we are so proud of you. Summer Stories 2025 reminded us that when young people tell their stories, not only do they reflect the world around them, they reshape it.
Show FEEST some love!
Youth are in the lead at FEEST because we know that change is not effective unless those most impacted by health inequities are the decision makers. Support youth leadership by donating today, OR sign up for our newsletter to get the latest from FEEST!