Project Community and Pelham Arts Center host workshop to help youth and teens curb amount of time spent on phones

Project Community is a local nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting youth and teens through mental health awareness, and skill-building initiatives that foster self-awareness, resilience, and confidence in navigating everyday challenges. Project Community partnered with the Pelham Art Center to host “Be the Influence,” the second workshop in a two-part series attended by more than 15 teenagers. The second workshop focused on helping teens better understand the time they spend on social media, how platforms are designed to maximize engagement, and how companies ultimately profit from user overuse.

“For the second workshop, Project Community and Pelham Art Center wanted to present social media use in a way that felt immediate and even shocking,” said Nancy Mazzei, Interim Executive Director at Pelham Art Center. “We wanted teens to understand that on these platforms, the commodity is them. When we started visually equating time spent to hours, days, months, and even years, it became much more tangible.” Read more.