I’ve known Daphne for nearly 7 years, since I first met with her over smoothies at Passion, a juice bar in Chalkida, Greece, that was a favorite among staff and volunteers with the international NGO Lighthouse Relief, working in the nearby Ritsona refugee camp. From that first meeting, when I was a terribly nervous new volunteer and she was my supervisor in the Youth Engagement Space (YES) at Ritsona, I could tell she was a warm person who put both me – and, as I’d learn through my following 5 months working in Ritsona, the youth in our spaces – at ease almost immediately. In fact, I think this characteristic – of making sure the people she works with are seen and heard, and feel comfortable and important – is very evident in the way she ran the Youth Engagement Space while I was working as a part of her team in Ritsona. When I first arrived at the YES – two isoboxes with art supplies, guitars, a mini library, and a working kitchen, spaced out by a covered patio and filled with plants – I was immediately struck by how warm and cozy it was with such minimal resources. In fact, I didn’t realize until much later that the YES had only started up shortly before my arrival in the summer of 2017; it already felt like such a lived-in and loving space that it was hard to believe it hadn’t been there forever. I think this is a testament to Daphne’s guiding vision of the space and ability to work with both colleagues and youth to collaboratively build a flexible space that could meet the wants and needs of the youth of Ritsona. I will always remember Daphne and her colleagues teaching me the foundational ethos of the space through the oft-repeated greeting, “Hello, how are you, would you like tea?” This greeting represented the core of their approach to the YES – to welcome youth, ask how they are and mean it, and invite them into the space with tea or, increasingly, Greek frappe. During my time with the YES, I witnessed how this approach helped a rotating crew of Lighthouse volunteers feel confident and at ease in the space, and more importantly, how youth residents of Ritsona felt at home in the space, that it was their space and meant to support them in their goals and interests. As new young people came to Ritsona and others left for resettlement paths elsewhere, the coziness and comfort of the YES remained as a place of refuge and joy. Part of this was achieved through the fact that Daphne led the creation of the YES through the feedback, input, goals, and priorities of the youth alongside whom she worked. As much as Daphne was a spearheader of the YES creation, she did it in collaboration with the youth of Ritsona every step of the way, and was unafraid to be flexible and shift the possibilities of the space as youth interests changed. One particular project from the YES that strikes me as being incredibly impactful was the Ritsona Kingdom Journal (RKJ), a youth-initiated digital magazine showcasing the art, writing, and views of members of the YES. As a roughly quarterly online publication across three years, this publication gave the young people of Ritsona an outlet for their creativity, frustrations, dreams, and ideas. I saw its impact firsthand as I shared each volume with my network back in the U.S., as a diverse group of my friends and family responded to youths’ work with compassion and understanding – things that were (and still are) woefully absent from the discourse around refugees in 2017. I bring up the RKJ because this more than any other project has inspired and informed the work I do presently as a community-engaged scholar. Based on the model of the RKJ, which to me demonstrates impactful change and social justice through an intentionally holistic program design, I have created my own zine-making curriculum (an idea that came to me through Daphne’s work with Storytelling Without Borders and Youth UnMuted) with resettled refugee teens in the U.S. The zine-making workshop was very much informed by the success of the RKJ in connecting refugee youth to real audiences, and was also designed based on what I learned working in the YES around best practices leading creative workshops with refugee youth. In other words, I owe much to Daphne for the success of this project, which served as the basis for my dissertation and is an ongoing project with a local community organization. Let me share one more story. In January 2017, U.S. President Trump announced the first iteration of his “Muslim Ban,” a time that saw me feeling hopeless and unsure of how I could possibly make an impact in the face of such staggering hate. I was in my final year of my MFA program in Creative Writing, and didn’t see how my passions and skill sets in teaching and writing could possibly make a difference; at the time, being anything other than a lawyer seemed useless. However, when I had the opportunity to go to Greece and work with Daphne and the rest of the team and youth in the YES, I completely turned around on my perspective of what impactful change can be and look like. Through projects like the RKJ, I saw how creative expression was healing, and how connecting with real, public audiences outside the walls of Ritsona camp was so meaningful to youth. This shifted something in me entirely, which put me down the path I am on now, as a recent PhD graduate and emerging teacher-scholar focused on public rhetorics, multimodality, and do-it-yourself publications like zines, magazines, and podcasts. I have said often in the many years since Greece that my time in the YES and especially with the RKJ showed me the true power of storytelling – to present counterstories, to push back against harmful rhetorics and policies, to express oneself and control one’s own creative output in a time devoid of control over some of the most fundamental aspects of one’s life, to show audiences what one’s life is actually like across the many borders and boundaries of contemporary society. I now yoke storytelling and justice together in a way I couldn’t have conceived of before meeting Daphne and joining the YES. My work with her on these – and many other programs that I seem to have run out of room to talk about – has transformed my understanding of justice and impactful change in a way that has set me up for the direction of the rest of my career.  I’m grateful to Daphne for the care she has put into each of the programs she’s led, including the YES and RKJ, and grateful too for the way she has nurtured our individual relationship in the years since. I can say honestly with zero hesitation that I am where and who I am today because of my work with her, her colleagues, and the youth of Ritsona in the Youth Engagement Space that she helped create and curate.

I had the privilege of working with Daphne through her nonprofit organization YouthUnmuted in the summer of 2019. During this time, I worked alongside her facilitating a series of weeklong storytelling workshops with young people living in refugee camps in Greece and Mexico. Daphne is the rare type of facilitator who can subtly guide a group while engaging deeply with each participant, getting to know them on an individual level, and moving a workshop forward in a way that meets core objectives while thoughtfully generating space for participants to co-own and drive the discussion. In her work with young people, I witnessed countless conversations where Daphne was quickly able to build interpersonal trust across lines of difference, ask probing questions, and encourage a young person to formulate and share their story as a mode for self-expression and creativity. ​ Daphne has a unique capacity for operational program design and personal inspiration rooted in simultaneous big-picture, creative thinking. In all that she does, Daphne thoughtfully pushes her audience, participants, and community to adopt a radically solutions-oriented mentality driven by the questions "Why not...?" and "What if...?" Daphne is a confident and self-aware leader who adeptly uses her talents for facilitation and emotional intelligence to inform, engage, and convince others to take action on the crucial issues of our times in a creative and generative push for a community that is more just, empathetic, and grounded in care for each other.

I worked with Daphne over several months in a refugee camp in Greece. During that time, I was lucky enough to see her build a youth engagement project from the ground up. Working with a group of underserved young people, she created a safe space for creative expression, social-emotional learning and quiet relaxation. Workshops on a range of subjects, from photography to storytelling, helped dozens of youth find their voices and position themselves as dynamic individuals with something to say.

It has been a joy to collaborate with Daphne! She comes with years of experience partnering with young people, wisdom, flexibility, and a full toolbox to help educators and organizations transform their youth programs. Daphne is a creative and fun facilitator who listens deeply and offers holistic learning experiences for youth and adults alike. Her immersive social justice storytelling workshops with the displaced youth and other immigrant populations we work with have been cathartic, yielding multimedia stories, original artwork, 3-D virtual reality, zines, podcasts, and engaging dialogue. Daphne also brings experience as a middle school educator and skills in curriculum development where she incorporates a youth-centric, social-emotional, and social justice lens to her work.

I could write infinitely about how wonderful a person Daphne is and about the incredible work she is doing! Our work recording the Now You Hear Us podcast was very influential for me. It was a place where I could be myself and share my thoughts, ideas, and experiences with other young people like me. The focus was always directly on the youth voices and their experiences. The workshops were peaceful, free, and open places where we could gather information about the themes that we wanted to share. They were also a space where we could think out of the box and come up with new things. For example, telling our stories through poetry. The Now You Hear Us project provided me with mental strength and helped me to never see myself as a useless refugee youth. It provided me with self-esteem. Daphne is a very open-minded person, especially when it comes to young people. She knows how to deal with any problem and find new solutions. Something that stood out and inspired me is how she is aware of the struggles that young people experience nowadays and how she is eager to find healthy solutions to help these youths.