Trauma-Informed Youth Changemaker Research | For You Page

Role: Researcher, Youth Advocacy & Wellbeing
Location: Remote
Dates: 2025 (Paused)

Quick Project Overview

For You Page (FYP) is a youth-led think tank and learning community shaping the future of digital culture, mental health advocacy, and generational change-making. As part of the qualitative research team, I led interviews with young advocates across global movements to understand how youth navigate purpose, burnout, belonging, identity, and systemic change.

My work focused on uplifting lived experience and designing trauma-informed insights to strengthen the infrastructures that hold youth wellbeing and activism over time.

• Context & Bckground

  For You Page (FYP) is a youth-led research collective and learning community shaping the future of digital culture, mental health, and youth civic leadership. At a moment when Gen Z is simultaneously inheriting unprecedented crises and pioneering new forms of hope, advocacy, and online community building, this project sought to understand the lived realities of young changemakers: their motivations, emotional labor, identity tensions, burnout, and visions for sustainable activism.

  Rather than treating youth leadership as a productivity narrative or a crisis response, this research positioned young people as cultural stewards and system-sensing agents. The goal was to illuminate what helps young advocates thrive — not just survive — and how intergenerational ecosystems must evolve to support sustained, relational, and trauma-aware change work.

• My Role & Contribution

  • Conducted 20+ in-depth qualitative interviews with youth mental health advocates, creators, and movement builders

  • Applied trauma-informed, relational design principles to capture lived experiences, identity tensions, and emotional labor journeys

  • Used an interview framework grounded in lived / loved / labored / learned contexts to surface whole-person stories, not just outcomes.

  • Identified patterns around cross-generational tension, burnout, flourishing, digital identity, and sustainable advocacy

  • Synthesized insights into emergent themes informing future tools, support ecosystems, and community design for youth changemakers

• Outputs

  • Insights for a forthcoming youth mental health / narrative ecosystems report

  • Themes informing advocacy toolkit & community support design

  • Generative questions and learning architecture for future youth civic programs

• Tools & Methods

  • Trauma-informed qualitative interviewing (creating safety, consent pacing, somatic awareness, co-agency in narrative shaping)

  • Semi-structured research protocols centered on lived experience, identity, belonging, power, and purpose

  • Narrative & thematic analysis to surface patterns around burnout, solidarity, role strain, and resilience

  • Cultural foresight & signal scanning to identify emerging trends in youth advocacy, digital belonging, and mental health ecosystems

  • Reflexive research practice — attending to researcher positionality, relational ethics, and emotional sustainability

  • Google Workspace for research synthesis and coding

  • Collaborative learning synthesis to translate qualitative insight into strategic recommendations for youth-centered movement design

Impact & Learning

This work deepened my understanding of youth activism as both a strategic force and a deeply personal inner journey. Through listening to young changemakers, I saw how advocacy is often carried in the body — held at the intersection of purpose, pressure, identity, and care. Youth leaders are not just pushing systems; they are metabolizing crisis, imagination, and responsibility at once.

The research underscored that burnout isn’t a failure of individual resilience — it’s a systems design issue. Sustainable change requires infrastructures of rest, interdependence, trauma-aware support, and cultural affirmation. Young people aren’t asking to be heroic — they’re asking for a world where impact and wellbeing are not mutually exclusive.

This project sharpened my skills as a qualitative researcher and reminded me why youth insight belongs at the center of social innovation: not because young people are “the future,” but because they are actively re-designing the emotional, relational, and civic architecture of change today. It strengthened my commitment to building ecosystems where activism is nourished, not extracted — a practice rooted in belonging, shared responsibility, and regenerative leadership.