Nanzhi Center, Taiwan Residential June 2023

Shadow Shifter

Jungle Jam’s Taiwan chapter

Eighteen young people, two days, and one discovery: the shape of your own shadow can be changed by what you do.

Three young people holding hand-written cards and a LEGO model in front of the hand-drawn Shadow Shifter wall
“Shadow Shifter — how might we become protagonists?” Nanzhi Center, June 2023.

When an object finds light, it creates a shadow — and we can change the shape of our own shadow through our actions.

Shadow Shifter began as a question asked in Taiwan: after a few workshops for young people and parents, could there be something longer — two days, residential, where youth had room to look honestly at themselves?

A temporary team formed to design it: three young people from Chiayi — Lua Lo, Lin Zheng (Bibi), and WanChi Zhao — working with Taejin Kim and Vahid Buehrer, adapting the Jungle Jam workshop first run in Dubai the year before. Eighteen young people aged 18 to 26 came from across Taiwan and gathered at the Nanzhi Center on 24–25 June 2023.

The frame was four words: light, shadow, shift, capacity. Nine challenges across two days, all of them hands-on. Meditative drawing, to notice the light and shadow qualities in other people. A mindful walk in the morning. Murals drawn straight onto the wall. A case clinic circle, where one person’s real challenge was listened to by everyone in the room. A role model built out of LEGO. And a letter each participant wrote to themselves.

“When an object finds light, it creates a shadow. And we can change the shape of our own shadow through our actions.”

A participant

Some activities were deliberately handed to the youngest people on the team to co-facilitate — because facilitation is a capacity too, and it is learned by doing it.

What shifted afterwards was small and specific. One participant’s parents noticed he had started listening to them. Another wrote about failure, and about wanting to look at service without fear. One said: “In the past I could never be that leader. But in the atmosphere of that activity, I wanted to show myself, and become the person who leads.” Nearly everyone asked about helping to facilitate the next one.

They also said two days wasn’t enough.
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Shadow Shifter is Jungle Jam’s Taiwan chapter — the same pattern, re-made by a different team, in a different place.

One pattern, many forms

Are You IN?

A different team, in a different place — could be yours.

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