“They can’t stop us from having fun”: Using the write-draw-storying method for strength-based research priority setting with sexual and gender minority youth in Waterloo Region

On behalf of the BRIDGES Lab, Dr. Tin D. Vo (Assistant Professor, University of Toronto, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work) and Chris Wang (Research Assistant) provide an update on their study co-creating research priorities with sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth in the Waterloo region. This project was supported through the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children’s 2025 Community Engagement Grant and Dr. Vo’s Internal Research Fund provided by the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.

Narratives of negative life outcomes and harms experienced by SGM youth dominate research, yet do not reflect the breadth and nuance of youth experiences, especially in considering their resiliency in the face of adversity and their many individual, interpersonal, and structural resilience-promoting factors. Compared to large metropolitan areas, there is little research on SGM youth living in suburban and medium-sized cities regarding strength-based evidence. Our study aims to combat deficit-based narratives in research by co-developing research priorities with high school-aged SGM youth in the Waterloo region using the write-draw-storying method for an early-stage of community-based participatory research (CBPR), allowing SGM youth to inform future community-engaged research with their lived experiences of queer joy, or rather, resiliency and positive life outcomes. We also share our lessons learned by engaging SGM youth in research processes as peer researchers and as participants of an arts-based method of engagement and data collection. Importantly, our work remains crucial in our current geopolitical and sociocultural contexts with the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans discourses and public policies, as well as eroding trust in some systems and institutions benefitting some groups and not others.

Our research team comprised an interdisciplinary team of investigators from the University of Toronto (Social Work), Wilfrid Laurier University (Health Sciences, Social Work), and University of Waterloo (Psychology), undergraduate and graduate research assistants, 4 youth peer researchers, and community partners (Camino Wellbeing + Mental Health, Spectrum, Woolwich Pride, and the Children and Youth Planning Table of Waterloo Region). The youth peer researchers were hired and trained to advise on project directions, implementation, data collection, data interpretation, and knowledge mobilization. Together, we have conducted 3 in-person world café sessions between October 2025 and January 2026 across 2 community sites in the Waterloo Region. In each session, we briefly presented findings from the Children and Youth Planning Table of Waterloo Region’s Youth Impact Survey, focused on SGM youth respondents’ mental health, belonging, loneliness, as well as bullying and other life experiences. This was followed by using the write-draw-storying method to explore the youth’s reactions to these data and related stories, compile their needs, assets, and community resources that support their wellbeing, as well as their priorities for future research. Our research team then developed domains for research priorities in collaboration with the youth peer researchers. We then presented these domains to the SGM youth leaders at the Gender-Sexuality Alliance (GSA) Conference hosted by Camino Wellbeing + Mental Health’s OK2BME Program in the Waterloo Region, as well as to representatives of youth service agencies in the Waterloo Region. Notably, our launch of the world café sessions in October came at the heels of SGM communities’ safety concerns in the Waterloo Region through threats of violence against SGM people at community events, which may have had implications for parents of SGM youth and the youth themselves in wanting to engage in ours world café sessions, among other events. Notwithstanding these concerns, some youth showed up in defiance and resistance, acknowledging the importance of our community gatherings for SGM communities, especially for the youth in solidarity and for community-building.

Engaging in arts-based CBPR with SGM youth yielded unexpected challenges and advantages. Our team found that while some of the youth initially seemed apprehensive when approaching the write-draw-storying method during sessions out of a sense of awkwardness, they became receptive to the method once we designated specific times for write-draw-storying and for oral storytelling. Adopting the write-draw-storying method additionally appeared dependent on the youth’s perceived awkwardness regarding sharing drawings in a group setting. Our use of this arts-based methods allows SGM youth to express their gender and sexual identities in creative ways, which, combined with the spoken narratives, helps us paint a more nuanced picture of SGM youth’s resilience-promoting factors, positive life outcomes, and queer joy.

The four domains of research priorities that emerged were SGM wellbeing and safety, inclusive socially responsive care, meaning of community, and queer joy. Across all sessions, the youth shared stories that demonstrated queer resistance amidst SGM discrimination, ranging from organizing GSA events at schools where discriminatory incidents had occurred, to throwing block parties to protest police shut-downs of SGM-facing community centres. The focus of these narratives on resilience-promoting factors aligns with the youth’s desire for more positive representations of SGM experiences in their own communities, young adult media, and youth-engaged research. Moreover, the youth emphasized the importance of GSAs and other existing community resources in the Waterloo region and wished to create more inclusive SGM spaces in their communities.

We are working on publishing our co-design and youth engagement process to share our lessons learned in our first phase of a CBPR project. Using our findings of youth-identified research priorities and the university-community partnerships, we are seeking funding to develop a pan-Canadian partnership with SGM youth leaders, community partners, and researchers for a multi-phased CBPR project to synthesize effective leisure interventions for SGM youth community-building and mental health, and then co-design tailored leisure interventions to be pilot tested and evaluated in different regions across Canada. Our future work will bring together an interdisciplinary team of researchers, trainees, youth peer researchers and leaders, and community partners with expertise in program design, evaluation, implementation science, youth engagement, community-building, and capacity-building. With a realist research and evaluation approach, we will employ a participatory, arts-based, mixed-methods design to determine what leisure interventions work, for whom, to what extent, and under what circumstances to enhance SGM youth’s belonging, sense of community, mental health, and resiliency – and, of course, more queer joy. In taking the lead from our youth peer researchers and participants, it does get better. However, it should not be better in some distant future, it should be better right now.