PRYSE Academy Starts Next Week! - June 2025
In the lead up to PRYSE Academy, our counselors and junior counselors participated in a 2-week staff training led by our co-directors, Ariana, Bahishta, and Vito, and our program manager, Cody.
For training this year, we wanted to capture the 2-week experience from our cohort's perspective by asking them to take pictures on digital and polaroid cameras. Many of the photos included in this newsletter were taken by our 2025 PRYSE Academy counselors and junior counselors!
Our 2025 cohort participates in an energizer to start the day.
Training Week 1
On June 23rd, our cohort of 13 counselors and 16 junior counselors met at the University of Pittsburgh for the kickoff of PRYSE Academy Staff Training 2025! The first week was full of introductions: to one another, to ARYSE as an organization, and to PRYSE Academy.
Each day of training featured a new theme or topic for the entire group to explore. During the first week some of the themes included connection, systems and counter-storytelling librarianship, and English Second Language (ESL) best practices.
The cohort engaged in various activities to share about themselves and their interests. A popular game in ARYSE spaces, that originated from After School Club, is human rock, paper, scissors. The goal is for everyone to learn each other's names while competing in a rock, paper, scissors tournament. Congratulations to our winner, Taliah, a counselor in the yellow classroom!
One of co-directors, Ariana, and our Youth Leadership Development Intern, Chance, pose for a picture.
We are thankful that many of our year-round ARYSE staff members were able to join the training, introducing themselves and offering their support to our seasonal staff at PRYSE Academy.
Meg and Erica led separate presentations to share about work they have been doing and how this work relates to the overall mission and vision of ARYSE. Meg's presentation reviewed the term forcibly displaced and who are forcibly displaced, and she also discussed the systems-thinking approach which we have adopted as one of our frameworks to guide our work.
Erica's presentation focused on the concept she introduced the ARYSE team to last year and has since been a foundation to our work: counter-storytelling librarianship. In her presentation, she went over the concept and how it has been implemented into ARYSE programs and, specifically, how it will be implemented this summer. Erica and our Storytelling and Curriculum Planning Intern, Rukiya, will be leading counter-storytelling and media literacy workshops within each of our 6 classes this summer!
Thank you, Meg and Erica, for sharing your knowledge with our PRYSE Academy team! We appreciate all that you both do to show up for ARYSE and our communities.
On the final day of the first week of training, we were excited to invite our 3 ESL teachers for this summer, Katherine Andrews, Megan Sommers, and Michele Kelly to share best practices for supporting ESL students and collaborate with our cohort on what they can expect during English instruction this summer. Each of them will lead daily 45-minute lessons to each of our 6 classes. We’re hopeful that with their help, our students will feel even more confident in the English literacy skills they develop with us the summer.
Training Week 2
The second week of training had a focus on our partners for the summer, inviting in our creative workshop facilitators, mental health and behavioral professionals, and included planning sessions within their classroom groups. To meet this year's counselors and junior classrooms, check out this reel on our Instagram!
Members of the aqua class prepare lessons for their students.
We are very happy to have UpStreet back again for another year of mental health support for our students. They attended training to share about their work, how to best support our students, and how they will be supporting us over the summer. This is the third year in a row that their therapists have been present at camp at least 1 day a week for our 5 weeks of camp.
We also invited the Just Discipline Project to speak with our cohort about restorative practices and the importance of using this framework to resolve conflict and behavioral issues.
Thank you to both UpStreet and the Just Discipline Project for supporting our cohort and students this summer. We appreciate all that you do!
As training came to an end, it was time to for our senior and junior counselors to experience what a typical day at camp may look like and that started with learning about this year's creative workshops. Our workshops for this year are mural making with Conor Coleman, zines with Maggie Negrete, acting with City Theater led by Ty Greenwood, printmaking with the Warhol led by Eoin Guidas, and STEM with Carnegie Melon led by Rechab Audhesse and Devin Bagaya. All of our workshop facilitators shared about their work, what the students' will be doing in the sessions, and how the cohort can support them.
Our cohort participates in an activity with Erica.
The final day of training included a walk-through of the camp day to allow our cohort to get a feeling of what a day in the life at PRYSE Academy will look like. This walk-through included examples of situations that may come up and our cohort working together to resolve them. We are so excited for this group of folks to lead and support our students throughout camp!
Here's to our 13th year of PRYSE Academy!