What Tell Your Story is
The Structure
Tell Your Story is an open call for young adults ages 16 to 24 in and around Mexia to share their experience, in any format, for a public anonymous gallery on this site and on the local library's social medias. The design choices are deliberate. Anonymity removes the social cost of going on record, which matters when you're asking someone to say something true about their life. Mixed format lowers the threshold to participate: writing, audio, video, and visual art all count, so no particular skill or equipment is required. A phone covers most formats. The library partnership puts a trusted physical presence in the community: staff who can answer questions in person, reach participants through existing channels, and handle consent documentation for participants under 18. The digital infrastructure stays with The Map.
The Inspiration
The program draws from Critical Positive Youth Development (CPYD), a research framework developed by Gonzalez, Kokozos, Byrd, and McKee (2020). Traditional youth development work focuses on building competence, connection, and confidence in young people. CPYD adds something called critical consciousness: the ability to reflect on your own experience, understand it in a larger context, and feel like you have some agency in shaping what comes next. The research points to storytelling as one of the primary ways those capacities actually develop. Tell Your Story follows that logic. When someone puts their experience into words on their own terms, and that experience is received without judgment or direction, the conditions for building critical consciousness, confidence, and self-efficacy are already in place. The program doesn't engineer those outcomes. It just gets out of the way.
What it Isn't
This isn't a curriculum. There are no outcomes measured by completion, no facilitator-led sessions, no required reflection prompts. The structure is intentionally minimal, because the program is designed to reach young adults who aren't enrolled in anything and aren't looking for a structured activity. Open calls don't require signing up for a program. The barrier is making one thing and submitting it through a form. That's a different threshold than a workshop, and it reaches a different population: the one that doesn't show up to programs but has something worth saying. Whether the approach generates the developmental outcomes the research identifies is one of the questions the pilot is designed to examine.
The pilot model
The Mexia pilot runs from October 5 through November 30, 2026, in partnership with Gibbs Memorial Library. The library serves as the physical host: a place where participants can get questions answered in person, where promotional materials live, and where participants under 18 can pick up the parental consent form required before their submission can be published. Submission intake, editorial review, and gallery publication are all handled digitally through The Map.
Gibbs Memorial Library — physical host, community promotion, consent form collection for participants under 18.
The Map to Adulthood — digital infrastructure: submission intake via Google Form, editorial review, anonymous gallery on this site.
The pilot is intentionally minimal. There are no mandatory sessions, no facilitator-led workshops, no curriculum. The goal at this stage is proof of concept: does an open call format reach young adults in this community? What does participation actually look like in practice? What is the realistic review workload? What does a gallery feel like once it has real entries in it? The Mexia pilot is designed to answer those questions in the hopes of informing other communities of what something like this could look like for them.
What we hope comes next
The goal for the Mexia program is that it doesn't stop at the end of the pilot window. The hope is that Gibbs Memorial Library renews it, that submission windows open again in future years, and that the gallery builds into an ongoing record of young adult life in the community. Submission intake and moderation for Mexia would remain with The Map throughout.
What won't scale is running the program for other communities at the same time. Managing intake, review, and publication across multiple parallel cohorts isn't something that fits within current capacity. If you're a community leader who wants to bring a program like this to your setting, the model is yours to replicate: your own partner institution, your own point-person for intake and moderation, your own gallery setup (or reaching out to The Map for collaboration). The framework transfers. The infrastructure doesn't need to.
The longer-term possibility is that programs running independently in different communities start collaborating by sharing what's working, brainstorming ways to help each other, and contributing to something larger than any individual gallery. That's not a current offering, but it's the direction this is pointing.
If you're a community leader thinking about bringing a program like this to your setting, or want to connect with the Tell Your Story Mexia team about what the pilot looked like in practice, reach out through the contact page.