Hi! I’m Rio. I’m a junior in high school and I designed Covid Youth Project to create a space for high schoolers to share their experiences as they go through this pandemic. Every story adds to a collective understanding of us teens with diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and perspectives. Covid-19 has, in some ways, united us as a species but has, in others, revealed structural inequalities that divide us. In the past weeks, our collective understanding seems to be shifting from feelings of isolation to feelings of anger and injustice. This is why we need your stories now more than ever.

If you are up for this, you have many choices. You can be anonymous, respond to only the prompts you choose, add pictures, re-record responses, and even withdraw your submission if you change your mind. All that it takes to connect and make your voice heard is to respond in two minutes to three simple prompts.

Once I gather enough data, I plan to analyze and present what we are learning. In the meantime, you can listen to what other teens are thinking and doing. Hopefully, by connecting through our stories, we can empathetically, kindly, and fiercely move through this hard time.