Kamryn Shawron

Deep Center’s mission is to empower Savannah’s youth to thrive as learners, community leaders, and agents of change. Through creative writing, cultural production, and art, Deep creates platforms for the city’s youth and the village of support around them, including their families and adult allies, to share stories, engage in debates, and make Savannah a more just and equitable place. Deep’s framework is trauma-informed and culturally responsive. We promote a roots-cause model of youth and community development that works on three parallel tracks: direct service, systems change, and narrative change. Deep lifts up youth and their village, advocates for just policies, and disrupts dehumanizing narratives with firsthand stories of community members healing, growing, and thriving throw individual growth and collective action. Our Pedagogy Deep uses writing, art, and culture to help youth and families connect their learning to their lives, their lives to their communities, and their actions to transformational change. We meet people where they are, at their joys, unique funds of knowledge, and community literacies to celebrate them, challenge them to express themselves powerfully, and support their critical awareness of how their stories intersect with their neighborhood block, their city, and the world beyond. Deep’s pedagogy is assets-based, encouraging participants to use their lives, families, and communities as the primary source material for their original writing, artwork, and leadership activities. Our organizational place in the communities with which we work is defined by the values of inclusion, transparency, and institutional humility. We listen. Our Village Deep pushes beyond the barriers that keep communities from coming together for change, and we work on the assumption that storytelling and culture have the unique power to create spaces where people can meet heart-to-heart to learn, connect, create, and have hard but life-changing conversations.