Empowerment Through Creativity and Community

Empowerment is an undeniably important facet of youth health and development; however, in remote areas of Madagascar, there are many cultural and contextual variations in defining it.

Pitt School of Public Health professors Sara Baumann and Jessica Griffin Burke utilized the participatory research tool Visual Voices to explore what empowerment means to Malagasy youth. Working with Projet Jeune Leader (PJL) and a team of 19 Malagasy youth educators, the Pitt team created a creative and fun space for the educators to experiment with art materials, share their thoughts, learn from each other and develop relationships.

Through their writings, drawings and paintings, the educators highlighted seven key themes of youth empowerment in Madagascar: having freedom, strength, goals, steps to achieve those goals, education, development and community support. 

After collaborating with the PJL educators, Pitt researchers then applied Visual Voices to their most important constituents: middle school students. They continue to build upon youths’ expertise with future research to generate a contextually relevant definition of youth empowerment that can be used to evaluate and improve the PJL program.

Conceptualizing Youth Empowerment Through Arts-Based Research Methods

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