Our plan
I love writing, and I wanted to share that love. I had heard about 826 Valencia, the writing center in San Francisco, so when I moved to Washington, DC, I wanted to start up a similar writing center there. Washington's public schools are among the lowest-performing in the nation and I knew that they could use help with teaching writing, and especially creative writing.
What we did
I found similar-minded people by contacting 826 National, and we started to meet regularly. We researched what resources were already available for DC students, what they needed, and how to start a nonprofit. About six months after our first meeting we held our first in-school workshop. We continued to recruit new volunteers and to build infrastructure to expand workshops and partner with more educators. I helped with the paperwork, with launching and maintaining the Web site, and taking minutes at Board meetings. In addition, I've taught or helped out at dozens of workshops. In particular, I've been a regular volunteer at Cardozo High School, working with juniors and seniors to write pieces for publication. After working all winter, in spring 2009 we published our first book, The Way We See It. This spring, after many weeks of meeting to write and revise, we'll publish our second one, Letters to Freshman.
Our results
Between the two years, about 35 students were involved. They are now published authors with one or more pieces in a book for sale at local bookstores. For many of them, this was a rare chance to express their own stories to a wide audience, and I think many of them realized that people want to hear these stories. I believe they came out of the project with more confidence in their own writing and storytelling abilities, and with a sense of accomplishment, embodied in the handsome books themselves.
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