Isabella Arrazola - Powerful Voices

Powerful Voices was a University of Florida - College of the Arts funded grant, led by faculty advisor and principal investigator Dr. Dori Griffin and in collaboration with graduate student Flory Sanabria and students from the local educational program Project YouthBuild. The main goal of the project was to explore the zine as a format for personal and political expression and amplify the voices of members of our young Gainesville community. We co-led a series of themed zine-making workshops where we touched upon identity, self-esteem, personal narratives, and their experience at their school.

We designed stickers to give students prompts for their zine spreads.

Mini collage books with pictures related to workshop themes.

03/30/22 Workshop: Imagine My Future
Lolly reflected about themes of activism and privilege that she had learned during class.
She expressed she would want to take an active role in lifting other people’s voices.

4/5/22 Workshop: My Story in Pictures
Isaiah learned in class about ancient Egyptian history and how that relates to his context as a Black student. He reflected on how this was an impactful moment for him.

With smaller groups, we acted as participant researchers and sat down with the students as we made things together.

4/7/22 - Workshop: My Project YouthBuild Story.
Destiney reflected on her time as a student at Project Youthbuild. The first day of school she felt that she was not going to fit in, but she quickly found a place where she made friends and was able to have a support system.

To wrap up the project, we collected student’s spreads into one zine that we got professionally bound and printed, and gave one copy to each of the students that contributed to the zine. We closed the Spring semester with a small gathering with the students to give back the finished zines and thank them for their time and effort.