Growing Into Leadership: Truc’s Journey from Mentee to Mentor
In 2022, Truc joined SHIFT nervous, uncertain, and convinced she was there to learn from others. By 2025, she was co-facilitating sessions, mentoring the next cohort, and appearing on Lao Cai provincial television, Vietnam. The distance between those two moments is the story of how SHIFT thinks about power, and what happens when we provide a supportive environment to activate the latent potential in young people.
Truc is a student from Lao Cai province in northern Vietnam, a region populated mostly by ethnic minority groups. She currently studies at the University of Languages and International Studies. Speaking to Truc about the time when she first entered SHIFT in 2022, she describes herself as lacking skills, nervous speaking in front of an audience and uncertain of her own potential.
That year, she was part of a cohort of eight Shifters who ran a reproductive health campaign tackling puberty taboos in their schools. Organising workshops, community surveys, and a Fun Run, Truc and her friends drew 1,450 students and reached over 45,000 people on social media. The Lao Cai Department of Education and Training took notice, publicly crediting the programme with meaningfully improving students' knowledge of reproductive health. It was an endorsement but not yet a partnership.
The SHIFT Model: Building a Pathway
SHIFT's model is built around a deliberate progression: although young people begin as participants in a programme, they also become candidates for eventually running it. The pathway from Shifter to speaker to mentor is structured, but it is also earned. Truc moved through each stage because she kept showing up; first for herself, then for others. What changed along the way, she says, was less about skills and more about perspective. That shift in orientation from recipient to co-designer is precisely what localisation looks like in practice.
“IN 2022, I FOCUSED MAINLY ON DEVELOPING MYSELF. BY 2025, MY FOCUS WAS NO LONGER ONLY ON MY OWN ROLE, BUT ALSO ON HOW TO SUPPORT AND MOTIVATE OTHERS.“
The transcript below has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Moving Beyond Participation: A New Logic for Leadership
In 2025, Truc helped mentor four teams of Shifters who co-organised the Lao Cai Youth Voices 2025 Forum: a province-wide gathering on 26 November that brought together more than 200 students, teachers, parents, and local authorities under one roof to talk about verbal violence in schools. The forum was the culmination of a year-long campaign across four schools, designed and facilitated by young people (alongside university deadlines), many of whom were from ethnic minority communities.
Crucially, it was co-organised not just by Save the Children, but by the Lao Cai Department of Education and Training, the same institution that had engaged as a supporter three years earlier. Fast forward to 2025, the Department came on board as a collaborator and co-owned the flagship event which is a living testament to what SHIFT has built in Lao Cai. Truc's arc and the department's arc turned out to be the same story of gradual but sustained and ever-deeper engagement.
This is the operating logic of a model that treats young people as architects of change rather than simply participants of it. And in Lao Cai, it produced something harder to manufacture than a forum or a television segment: a community and an institution that now expects young people to lead, because it has spent three years watching what happens when they do.
“IN 2022, I FOCUSED MAINLY ON DEVELOPING MYSELF. BY 2025, MY FOCUS WAS NO LONGER ONLY ON MY OWN ROLE, BUT ALSO ON HOW TO SUPPORT AND MOTIVATE OTHERS.“
- Truc, SHIFT Mentor (Vietnam)This article is based on an interview held with Truc and Ha (Fun Adult) on 22 May, 2026
