We give you the space, the tools, and the community to rewrite what comes next. Drug-free. Land-grounded. Story-led healing for young Canadians aged 16–29.
Narrative therapy teaches us that we are not our problems — we are the authors of our lives. We help youth externalize pain and find the story underneath the struggle.
Indigenous land-based healing philosophy grounds our entire approach. Connection to the natural world, to community, and to cultural identity are not optional — they are foundational to wellness.
Theatre, spoken word, music, and storytelling are not decorative — they are evidence-based pathways to emotional processing, identity formation, and community healing. When a young person performs their story and is witnessed by others, something shifts that no prescription can replicate.
These aren't statistics. They're young people in our communities who deserve better than a waitlist.
"The most dangerous thing we can do is normalize a system where young people are suffering in silence while the support they need remains just out of reach."— Goldirose Hotz, Founder, StoryHeal Canada
StoryHeal runs its own workshops and convenes community partners around three interwoven healing frameworks — each one rooted in evidence, each one human at its core.
Narrative therapy separates the person from the problem. Youth learn to externalize what they're carrying — anxiety, grief, shame, rage — and discover the stories underneath that speak to their strength, not just their suffering.
Using techniques from Michael White and David Epston's foundational work, participants engage in lifeline mapping, re-authoring exercises, and witness circles — always in a group context that builds community alongside resilience.
Evidence-Based Ages 16–29 Group Format Drug-FreeInspired by the Eight Ujarait (Rocks) Model, Makimautiksat Camp practices, and the work of Indigenous healers and Elders, our land-based healing circles bring youth into relationship with the natural world as a direct pathway to wellness.
We do not appropriate Indigenous practices — we collaborate with Indigenous-led organizations and knowledge keepers as equal partners, centering Indigenous self-determination in every land-based initiative we organize or support.
Indigenous-Led Community Partnership Holistic HealingWhat sets StoryHeal apart from every other youth mental health initiative is this: we believe performance is medicine. Theatre, spoken word, digital film, audio memoir, collaborative writing — these are not hobbies. They are evidence-based pathways to emotional processing and identity formation.
Led by arts practitioners with deep roots in theatre and community performance, our labs give youth the tools to take their narrative off the page and into the room — where healing becomes visible and witnessed.
Arts-Based Digital Storytelling Expressive TherapyStoryHeal is built for youth aged 16–29 across Canada — with particular focus on communities who face the largest gaps between need and access.
Indigenous youth face the most severe mental health disparities in Canada — not because of individual deficit, but because of systemic violence. Our land-based healing initiatives are designed in partnership with Indigenous communities, Elders, and knowledge keepers. We follow, we don't lead — and we centre Indigenous self-determination at every step.
Black youth in Canada navigate mental health distress compounded by anti-Black racism, economic inequality, and systemic barriers in education and employment. AMANI (CAMH) and the Black Youth Helpline are partners in our work. StoryHeal's narrative and performative approaches create culturally affirming spaces where Black youth can tell their stories on their own terms.
2SLGBTQ+ young people face disproportionate rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation — and are far less likely to receive affirming care in clinical settings. StoryHeal creates explicitly inclusive, gender-affirming spaces for 2SLGBTQ+ youth to explore identity, process experience, and build community through story and performance.
University and college campuses are communities in crisis. Academic pressure, financial precarity, social isolation, and the collapse of identity that attends major life transitions create the conditions for profound mental health distress. StoryHeal partners with post-secondary institutions to bring healing workshops directly to campus — including a pilot at Queen's University.
StoryHeal's approach is accessible, non-clinical, and designed to meet young people exactly where they are.
Youth reach us through campus partners, community organizations, or directly through our website. No referral required. No diagnosis needed. Just a willingness to show up.
Participants join an introductory workshop or storytelling circle. They choose their pathway: narrative therapy, land-based circle, or performative lab — or all three over time.
Through structured creative processes, youth externalize their experience, identify moments of strength, and build a new narrative that belongs to them — not to their struggles.
Graduates of our workshops become part of the StoryHeal community — as peer supporters, workshop assistants, and advocates. Healing is never a solo act.
StoryHeal's approach isn't invented — it's drawn from decades of peer-reviewed research and Indigenous community knowledge. Here's what the evidence shows.
RCT studies show Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) reduces PTSD symptoms by over 60% in multiply-traumatized youth, with effects maintained at 6-month follow-up. Youth re-author trauma narratives with guided support, shifting from fragmented pain to coherent strength.
Schauer, Neuner & Elbert (2020); PMC National Library of MedicineChandler & Lalonde's landmark research (2008) found that Indigenous communities with high cultural continuity — including land-based practice — have dramatically lower youth suicide rates. Connection to land is not metaphorical; it is measurably protective.
Chandler & Lalonde (2008); Eight Ujarait Model, NunavutLambert (2010) and subsequent studies document that digital storytelling interventions increase self-efficacy, emotional regulation, and social connectedness among marginalized youth — outcomes that persist beyond the workshop itself.
Lambert (2010); Journal of Adolescence (2021)The I-SPARX game — developed for Inuit youth in Nunavut — is the gold standard for culturally adapted digital mental health intervention. Pilots with 121 youth showed significant reductions in depression and hopelessness, validating the community co-design model.
Bohr et al. (2024); JMIR Serious GamesYouth learn to separate themselves from their problems: "the anxiety" rather than "I am anxious." This linguistic shift is the entry point to agency.
Participants identify moments in their past that contradict the dominant problem story — building an alternative narrative grounded in their own evidence of resilience.
Sharing one's story in community — being witnessed by peers — is one of the most powerful therapeutic mechanisms available. StoryHeal's circles make this accessible.
Drawing on Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, we redirect youth from self-focus to purpose and meaning — transforming eco-anxiety, loneliness, and existential drift into agency.
Theatre techniques — including role-play, improvisation, and embodied performance — give the body a voice when words alone aren't enough.
MMT's DREAM framework helps youth build a values-based identity, increasing hope and reducing transdiagnostic mental health symptoms across anxiety, depression, and trauma.
StoryHeal was built by a team that understands — from the inside — why this matters and what's at stake.
Goldirose Hotz is a fourth-year Honours English student at Queen's University and the founding force behind StoryHeal Canada. Her path to this work runs along two tracks that rarely meet in one person: a life shaped by the arts, and a deepening commitment to equity advocacy that began in grade 11. On the arts side: winner of the RAVE Award (Recognizing Arts Vaughan Excellence), Canada Kids Festival veteran, lead performer in multiple stage productions, singer and theatre-maker who has spent years exploring the relationship between story and the human interior.
On the advocacy side: contributions to discrimination research affecting Black communities, involvement in HRTO proceedings on behalf of women faculty and staff at post-secondary institutions, and — alongside her father, Glyn Hotz — a close working understanding of how legal systems fail people and what it takes to tell that story in a room where it matters. At StoryHeal, both tracks converge: the artist who knows what it costs to perform your truth, and the advocate who knows why it has to be told.
Jodi Zahara brings over 22 years of classroom experience — teaching Grade 7 in Victoria, BC — to her role as StoryHeal's Director of Education and Workshops. Two decades at the front lines of early adolescent development gives Jodi something no textbook provides: an intimate, hard-won understanding of how young people actually learn, communicate, struggle, and grow. She knows how a room changes when a young person feels genuinely seen. She knows what it costs a child to ask for help, and what it means when that help arrives in a form they can receive.
Jodi approaches StoryHeal's workshop design with the same philosophy she has brought to every classroom: that every young person has something worth saying, and that the educator's role is to create the conditions in which they can say it. She leads program development and facilitator training with rigour, warmth, and the kind of practical wisdom that only comes from years of showing up.
Brooke Rhiger is one of those rare people who leads without announcing it. An incoming mathematics student at Western University, a 2nd-degree black belt and certified karate instructor, a Relay for Life participant, and a school Ambassador — Brooke has spent her young life in service to community, to rigour, and to the belief that every person is capable of more than others have told them they are.
That last conviction is at the heart of how Brooke works. She strives to be the kind of person — and one day the kind of teacher — who meets students where they are rather than where a label says they should be. Who empathizes without condescending. Who offers hope not as a platitude, but as a practical starting point. Who helps young people understand their abilities on their own terms, free from the limitations imposed by others' definitions of them.
As Director of Community and Campus Engagement, Brooke leads StoryHeal's university partnerships, campus pilot programs, and media presence — bringing the same discipline and human warmth to organizational outreach that she brings to every room she enters.
Glyn Hotz leads Hotz Lawyers, with extensive experience in class action litigation and human rights cases — including acting for class members in the Black federal public sector employees class action and deep familiarity with HRTO proceedings involving gender discrimination and institutional harassment. He has heard the stories that became cases: what was ignored, what was dismissed, what was finally forced to a reckoning. As StoryHeal's Legal Advisor, that direct exposure to how institutions fail people — and how they can be held to account — gives the organization's governance both rigour and moral grounding.
I spent two years thinking I was broken. The workshop didn't fix me — it showed me I was never broken. I was just carrying a story I hadn't been allowed to put down yet.
Standing on the land with an Elder, talking about where I come from — I felt something shift in my chest. I don't have another word for it except healing. That's what it was.
I've never been in therapy and I never thought I'd go. But performing my story — actually getting up and saying it out loud — that was the most therapeutic thing I've ever done.
Narrative therapy isn't just a counselling technique — it's a fundamental reimagining of how we understand pain, identity, and change. Here's what the research shows, and why it matters for young Canadians right now.
Land-based healing isn't a retreat program. It's a millennia-old practice of restoring the relationship between people, community, and the earth they belong to.
56% of young Canadians report climate anxiety affecting their daily function. StoryHeal's approach turns grief into narrative, and narrative into momentum.
How a Nunavut-designed video game became one of the most important mental health interventions of the last decade — and what it teaches us about community co-design.
Long before clinical psychology existed, performance was how communities processed grief, celebrated identity, and made sense of the inexplicable. We've forgotten this. StoryHeal is here to remember it.
Goldirose Hotz on the gap she kept seeing, the question she couldn't stop asking, and why she decided — despite everything — to try anyway.
StoryHeal is building relationships with Canada's leading funders of youth mental health, Indigenous wellness, and arts-based community programs. These are our current and target grant partners.
Youth Mental Health Grant · Up to $30,000
Supports organizations serving Black youth, 2SLGBTQ+ youth, and youth living with physical disabilities. StoryHeal's mandate is a direct fit. Applications open annually January–March.
Up to $25,000 · Applications open May 2026
Annual grants for registered charities delivering mental health supports in communities across Canada. Application window opens May 2026 — StoryHeal should apply in this cycle.
Youth Opportunities Fund · Rolling intake
Two streams: Test Grant (new ideas) and Scale Grant (expanding proven programs). Prioritizes Indigenous and Black youth, ages 12–25. One of Ontario's most significant youth funders.
Up to $20,000 · Indigenous Communities Fund up to $25,000
Supports youth-focused health and education projects. Rolling deadlines by region. The Indigenous Communities stream is a strong fit for StoryHeal's land-based healing partnerships.
Research partnership · Deadline June 16, 2026
Supports youth-led and youth-engaged research to improve health outcomes. Relevant if StoryHeal partners with a university research team — the Queen's University connection makes this viable.
Up to USD $50,000
Supports community-led groups advancing physical, mental, and social well-being for populations most affected by systemic inequities. Less known than other funders — strong dollar amount and direct mission alignment.
Interested in supporting StoryHeal's grant applications or connecting us with a funder? Get in touch.
StoryHeal is a registered Canadian nonprofit. Every dollar goes directly to delivering workshops, supporting young people, and building the infrastructure that makes this work sustainable.
We don't believe healing should have a price tag. But building access to it requires resources — and that's where you come in.
Choose an amount or enter your own. Every contribution makes a difference.
StoryHeal is in its founding year. This is the moment when everything is still possible — and when the people who show up first shape everything that follows.
Bring your skills — in education, arts, community work, mental health — to help design and deliver StoryHeal workshops. We especially welcome Indigenous facilitators, artists, and educators.
Apply to VolunteerAre you a campus wellness centre, community organization, Indigenous-led initiative, or youth-serving nonprofit? Let's build something together. We're actively seeking founding partners.
Explore PartnershipShare our stories. Connect us with people who should know about this work. Invite us to speak. The most powerful thing you can do right now is tell someone StoryHeal exists.
Subscribe & ShareWhether you're a young person who wants to participate, an organization that wants to partner, a researcher who wants to collaborate, or a donor who wants to understand the work — we want to hear from you.