SHOREline: A Gulf Coast Youth Empowerment Project

The SHOREline youth-empowerment project grew out of research in to the health effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on Gulf Coast youth.  Capitalizing on enhancing pro-social behavior among high school students, SHOREline uses a project-based learning curriculum to facilitate the development of “Skills, Hope, Opportunities, Recovery, and Engagement.”  The project’s goal is to develop a network of youth who help themselves, their families, their schools, their communities, and youth in other communities recover from disaster. Its mission is twofold: (1) To establish and sustain a network of disaster-affected youth; and (2) to develop skills, foster hope, and capitalize on opportunities to help disaster-affected youth recover from the loss and disruption caused by disasters.  The project was inaugurated in September 2013 at schools in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  One hundred students applied to the program and sixty were accepted.  The programs are run as both curricular and extra-curricular programs.  This presentation will describe the curricular elements employed in the five chapters, report on the results of the program evaluation, and describe the “Capstone” projects developed among the high school chapters and how they are intended to achieve the program’s objective of “youth helping youth recover from disaster.” The SHOREline participants were challenged to articulate a problem that affects communities or youth after a disaster, identify a solution, and develop a project “to scale” so that it can be exported to other communities. The presentation will highlight one of the Capstone projects as described by a SHOREline youth participant.