Helping Young People Find Their Voices

We knew our grads were impressive, but a new survey that quantifies the impact of U of A alumni wowed even us. Grads contribute $250 billion to the global economy every year — and that’s just one of the many ways our grads enrich the world around us. Here we celebrate one of the people behind those numbers.

As a young adult, Gail Sidonie Šobat, ’83 BEd, ’91 MA, set her sights on acting. When she auditioned for university acting programs across the country and wasn’t accepted, she was crestfallen.

Undeterred, she devised a new plan: earn an education degree and teach K-12 while honing her acting in her spare time. It worked. Within a few years, Šobat was acting professionally. But something didn’t feel quite right.

“I missed teaching,” she says. “I thought, ‘Clearly, I am meant to work with kids.’” The backup plan became a passion and has remained a constant throughout her eclectic career of performing arts (acting and singing), writing (she has published 12 books) and public speaking (as far afield as Turkey, Qatar and Vietnam).

But nothing has tested the limits of Šobat’s creativity and tenacity like YouthWrite. The arts organization, which grew out of a summer writing camp operated by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, offers writing camps, workshops and events for young people. Šobat began by co-ordinating the camp in 1996 and ended up running it as an independent organization in 2010.

In the early years, she and her partner had to use their own money to help fund the camp, but the non-profit venture eventually became sustainable. Now YouthWrite offers programming throughout the year in fiction, poetry, comics, social media, online role-playing and other forms of new media. It also spawned the Spoken Word Youth Choir, a spoken word troupe that performs individually and as a group for charitable and educational events.

“At a time when I was questioning my worth, YouthWrite taught me my voice was important and valued,” says Lauren Seal, ’13 BA, who attended the camp from 2005 to 2009. Seal is a writer, librarian and former poet laureate of St. Albert, Alta., whose debut YA novel-in-verse, Light Enough to Float, will be published this year.

“My entire life is based around words, books, and poetry. I truly do not know who I would be if I hadn't gone to YouthWrite.”

Peter Takach, ’12 BA, ’14 BEd, says his experiences at YouthWrite as a camper and, later, a supervisor continue to inform his writing, teaching and life. (Not to mention, that's where he met his wife Hillary Amman, ’21 BEd.)

“YouthWrite gave me the spark and the tools and the nurturing environment to write and to live boldly,” says Takach, now a teacher, librarian and writer living in B.C.

Šobat says that over the years of running the camp, she has witnessed changes in the young people who attend, which she attributes to major social change and technologies like smartphones.

“But at their hearts, young people are still their wonderful, complicated selves — wanting to be seen, listened to, given a voice. That’s what we do at YouthWrite.”

She says writing and other forms of creativity offer children a way to make sense of the rapidly changing world around them while getting to know their own hearts and minds.

“Youth can feel powerless,” she says. “We give them a voice. We invite them to raise it, share it and publish it, because they are the change-makers.”

For parents, teachers and other adults wondering how to foster creativity in young people, Šobat offers some advice.

Put away the tech

“My number one recommendation is for families to get off devices and for parents to model creativity for young people. The family that reads together, makes music and art together, produces creative youth. Give a kid a book, a piece of paper, some pencils or crayons. Let them play outside, and if they’re old enough, let them take some risks.”

Loosen up the schedule

“I also strongly recommend less structuring of kids’ lives so they have time to get bored and figure out how to navigate that boredom. Learning how to play by themselves — and physically and inventively with each other — is another key to creativity, in addition to problem-solving, self-regulation and conflict resolution.”

Listen

“Find time to be attentive to art- or music-making or listen to kids’ spoken and written words. Young people have so much to say. We need to make time and give our full attention to listen.”