(Joel Arquillos, Benjamin De Leon, Grant Faulkner, Gerald Richards) Join 826 National, 826LA, and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) as they discuss different strategies on forming partnerships between schools, literary nonprofits, volunteers, and teachers on both a local, national, and global scale, and how these partnerships enable creative solutions for both educators and students. What are the challenges of maintaining these partnerships, and what is their impact on the diverse population of under-resourced students they aim to empower through writing?

Published Date: June 15, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Joel Aoss, Benjamin Delo, grant Faulkner, and Gerald Richards. You will now hear Gerald Richards provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Thank you for coming out at nine o'clock in the morning. So just so to make sure you're in the right room, this is forming resilient partnerships, how literary nonprofits, schools, and individuals can collaborate effectively. I'm Gerald Richards. I'm the c e O for 8 2 6 National and 8 2 6. National is a network of creative writing and afterschool tutoring centers located in seven cities here in the us and we worked with six to 18 year olds on their creative writing and getting them excited about writing and growing a love of writing. And I have the pleasure of moderating this panel with these three gentlemen. So why don't you introduce yourselves?

Speaker 3 (00:01:12):

No thanks Gerald. I like to introduce myself and my role as executive director of National Novel Writing Month. The first call I made to another nonprofit ed was to Gerald at 8 2 6, and that's because it was the one nonprofit I wanted to work with because 8 2 6, I think of all the nonprofits in the world, they share our mission and our spirit almost identically. And I like it to think about this like walking into an 8 2 6, you're immediately struck by the wonder and the awe and the magic and the whimsical of it all. And it's an invitation to be a creator and a writer. And that's what we do at Nana Rmo. Nana Rmo is the acronym for National Novel Writing Month. And to put it simply, we just believe that everyone has a story to tell and that everyone's story matters except in the world so often that story doesn't get told.

Speaker 3 (00:02:00):

Sometimes people think I'm going to write that novel someday and someday rarely happens. For most people, those perfect conditions of writing just rarely appear. And also I think it's about giving yourself permission. A lot of people see other people as writers, whether that's people in M F A programs or people who live in Brooklyn or white men or older people. We like to think that everyone's a writer and that you're a writer. You become a writer in the act of writing. We make that happen through this simple challenge too. Write 50,000 words in a month.

Speaker 2 (00:02:33):

Simple

Speaker 3 (00:02:33):

Challenge. That's the simple part. That's the simple part is saying it. Yeah, we believe that a deadline and a goal are creative midwives. You have to do that to make things happen. So part of becoming a writer is learning to do with time management to develop the grit and the resilience to show up every day and do it. And beyond that, we break down the mythology of a solitary writer. So we really believe that writing happens best in the community of other people. So we form that community both online. We have very active, vibrant forums. There are a million forum posts in the anal forums during the month of November. We also have a network of super volunteers called Municipal Liaisons, and they're located, there are about a thousand of them located literally around the world, and they host live writing gatherings throughout the month of November.

Speaker 3 (00:03:16):

Many of them do it year round as well. And then we work with about a thousand libraries across the country, and they also host live writing events in libraries. Libraries are increasingly become ink spaces of making and creating, not just archives of books. And then finally, we have this great program, the Young Writers Program, and about 350,000 people sign up for ARIMO every year and then a hundred thousand people sign up on our Young Writers program site, which is for kids and teens. And so the kid program works a little bit differently. They don't have to write 50,000 words. They can set their own word count goal. So like my daughter who's a fourth grader wrote 10,000 words last year. But then that program also includes, we ship free classroom materials and common core line curricula and a variety of other things to about 2000 classrooms across the nation. This year we're going to shoot for 3000 and it's all free. We operate just on providing access for all, and I think I went too long.

Speaker 4 (00:04:10):

Hello, I'm Joel Aoss. I run H two six Los Angeles and we actually, if you haven't had a chance yet, you can come visit us. We have an Echo Park location, which is really close to here, which is fronted by the very famous time Travel Mart. We're having a special on William Mammoth meet this week. Our robot emotions are always fun, but we're part of the family of H two is across the nation. There's seven of us, seven chapters in la. We have actually two locations. We have an Echo Park location. We also have one in Mar Vista. And just this last year we got a classroom inside of a school in manual arts, which is not too far from here, south LA with H two six. Our goal is to support students ages six to 18 with a creative and expository writing skills. And we make it possible by recruiting volunteers from all walks of life, not just writers, but we do have a lot of writers, which is amazing and wonderful.

Speaker 4 (00:05:01):

But we bring folks to give students one-on-one undivided attention on their work. I was a former classroom teacher many years ago and I benefited from H two six in San Francisco when it first opened up. And Ben, who's tell you more about teaching now, but I had classrooms where I had 40 students at times, and H two six had just started and they said, well, look, we can bring folks from the community into your classroom to work with your students on that essay that you're writing about immigration or whatever we were working on at the time, and we can provide you some support to students. And I was like, that's fantastic. I can't put my desk outside of my classroom anymore while my class goes wild to give my students some undivided attention. And so it was amazing. They brought up to 20 volunteers. We'd have to go down to the cafeteria and break up at the tables because each of my students would have at least one tutor who would look over their paper, talk to them, give 'em the feedback.

Speaker 4 (00:05:55):

And I just saw how amazing was to expose our students or inner city kids who lived in parts of if San Francisco alongside of folks who maybe were coming in to volunteer but never really had an occasion to connect with each other. But in a classroom. Here we are, we're bringing in folks to work together and to get to know each other. And there's some, at the beginning it's hard. A lot of the students don't necessarily always trust or know who these folks are, but you build these bonds and over time real trust happens. And I think students begin to really find these sort of new mentors. And so we do this in LA for a lot of students. We have the tutoring program, which is our afterschool program where students come in, we work on homework first and once that's done, we do some reading and writing.

Speaker 4 (00:06:39):

We publish books by the students in our afterschool tutoring program. We do a field trip program during the day where entire classrooms will come into either one of our centers and will write a book with us in less than two hours. And we have a fun one called Storytelling and Bookmaking, where we have a fictional editor who lives upstairs. His name is Mr. Barnacle and he's incredibly cranky and he will fire everyone if they don't produce a unique story by the end of the day. And somehow the kids pull it off and every kid lives with a published book. They have their own bio in the back and their photo and author photo on the back before they leave and they go home with a final produced story. Then we're also going into schools throughout Los Angeles where we're working with what the teachers need and we're helping also to produce books by students.

Speaker 4 (00:07:21):

We'll talk a little bit more about that later. And then we have workshops, evenings and weekends and a variety of topics. We do a journalism workshop regularly where we have LA Times writers and other journalists who come in and help students write stories that they're interested in. They interviewed famous folks who come through and it's really a fun time for them. We also do workshops on Saturdays where we do a reading program Saturday, we're doing it right at 10 o'clock. It starts where students who we've noticed or who have tested as lower in the reading scale who are having challenges in reading, they'll come in and they'll just work with a volunteer to read and they'll talk about what they're reading and they'll write stories about what they're reading. And slowly they begin to really become more confident and you start to see them really change in lots of ways.

Speaker 4 (00:08:03):

And so we're doing a lot of different things like that and it's all made possible by amazing volunteers. So part of the work is recruiting volunteers, training, retaining volunteers to help them keep them engaged, to help us support the students across the city. We're serving up to 9,000 kids a year here in Los Angeles with this program. It's all free. We target students who couldn't afford these services, otherwise we make it a goal to make sure we're serving the highest need schools and the highest need students who come to our centers. And we've been really, really happy and lucky to see so many great things coming from those kids. But I'll stop there.

Speaker 5 (00:08:42):

Good morning, Vicki, for having me. It's fantastic to be here because I am listening to the bios of my partners up here. And I think my classroom was a perfect, I guess, laboratory for that. My name is Benjamin Lon. I teach US history, a P U s and regular US history. One town over in Boyle Heights, not too far away from here, just crossed the bridge from Little Tokyo and near there in about 10 minutes away from here. Last year I had a two six LA partner up with my classroom and we had about close to 60 students participate in this amazing writing project, which eventually led to a book called We Are Alive When We Speak for Justice. It was a collection of short stories, historical narrative, personal essays, a couple poems, interviews, views, an anthology of sorts. I think that's probably the best way to put it.

Speaker 5 (00:09:36):

And it was written, edited, designed for the most part by just these 16, 17 year olds. And it was an amazing labor of love that was truly special to witness. It's funny, but just to piggyback on what you said earlier, you brought up this idea of, forgive me if I'm chopping up your words, but use the word the mythology of writing. How do you break that? And I think it was a great experience because just working with close to 60 kids who don't consider themselves writers, I mean half of the time, unless you have a really cool 11th grader, it wasn't me, but they're just really into writing. I think at this stage in their lives. A lot of high school kids, they see writing as something like, oh god, another writing project. And I think it was really special to see them just really evolve and see themselves as writers. And I think a lot of that was the magic of a two six and the support of a two six. So I teach in L U S D, I've been a teacher for about 10 years. That was my role in this. And I guess we will talk more about that as it goes on, but there is a new project coming out soon, we're just talking about it. And I guess we'll talk about that a little bit more later.

Speaker 2 (00:10:51):

Great. Thank you. And thank you for the new people walking. So I'm just going to jump right in. So Ben, you did a good great segue. If you can talk about Joel, you and Ben can talk about the Young Office book project, which is one of eight two six's signature programs. And as I discussed, we work with a group of students in the classroom to create a published anthology, a beautiful book that the students can walk away with. So talk a bit about the book you did, this book you did at menez.

Speaker 4 (00:11:15):

So we've been doing these young authors book projects for years. Actually when I was a teacher, I got to do one of these and it was incredible experience. And like you were saying, some students are really into it. Sometimes it takes a little more to engage other students who sometimes really it's about a fear, it's a fear of like, is my story going to be good enough? Is it really something people want to hear? And sometimes there's some very intense experiences that young people sometimes don't know if it's okay to talk about. So there's a lot of that that happens. But we've been doing these young authors book, we have 13 books now. We're working on one right now that we're finishing up at an Animal Venice, and we have the Lotus Huta is going to write the introduction to the book this year. So we're really excited about that.

Speaker 4 (00:11:52):

This year's theme is about a moment in your life that transformed you. And so the kids run these short pieces and some of them are running very long pieces about those things, but the idea is to really give students the experience of what it is to publish a book. And so we spend up to six weeks sometimes in the writing process where volunteers come in week after week two to three times a week and work with students on just that piece. Once that's done, we have students who are really interested in going further with the process who become our editorial board. And in that phase they will work with professional designers who come in and get their take on how do you like how this is looking? What do we do with the cover? What do we do with the chapters? How do we break this all up?

Speaker 4 (00:12:35):

They work with copy editors, they learn how to copy edit, they learn all the wonderful next stages of producing a book. So it's a real chance to sort of see the craft of bookmaking. And then at the end, we celebrate the book with a nice event at a venue. We have a reading, we have cake, we have signing. We used to put plumes on the pen. We don't do that anymore, but we actually have a whole authors too. But you have cake. We do have cake. And the idea being that in the end, we want kids to really feel proud of their books and we take our designs very, very seriously. We have some very amazing designers who volunteer their times also to help us lay out these books and we want them and we have these beautiful final products. But yeah, we got to work with Ben this past year, my director of education, Marisa gni, she headed up the project with Emily Colson. And the project is always made better when we have an amazing teacher to work with. And then Ben is one of these amazing teachers who can inspire his students. And it's a lot of work to keep this going and especially when you also have all your other teaching to do and all the other things that are demanded of you as a teacher. But when we find partners that really know what it takes and it makes all the difference, and Ben was one of those partners.

Speaker 5 (00:13:42):

Thank you. So the book again, it's titled, we Are Alive When we Speak for Justice. Again, I teach a history class and I really enjoy teaching history from the point of view of voices that have not necessarily been heard, but that I think need to be heard. And even if it's for a small audience or a big audience, I think that's really kind of what sets somebody free. And for a lot of my students, well lemme start off with the content first. We studied the landmark Westminster versus Westminster case, which was one of these landmark cases that desegregated schools in California precursor to Brown versus board. Our school Mendez is actually named after the family gon Menez. So already we have almost this historical relationship with the family. So we spent a good maybe about a month and a half to two months partnering with two professors from Cal State la, Cal State, LA is not too far away, city Terrace.

Speaker 5 (00:14:42):

And for about a month and a half, two months, my kids benefited from an amazing set of lesson plans teaching from again, that partnership with those professors from Cal State la. At that point, the 8, 2 6 tutors came in and I mean it was amazing. It was an army of tutors, just this army of tutors that came in. I want to say the ratio was about two or three to one. And when I presented it to my students, I think there were something that got really fired up about it, incredibly excited about it. But then there are those just recalcitrant writers, again, they're 11th grade kids. And for the most part, in this world of common core where, and again, if you're hip to the educational language, this common core is this push to now get kids ready for that college level reading, which really focuses on finding an author's claim.

Speaker 5 (00:15:39):

What is the appropriate word choice within the historical context. I mean it, it's a very prescriptive kind of, I mean it's great the kids need to know that kind of stuff, but I think for students where here's another primary source guys, what is the author trying to say? How's he backing up his evidence? Writing's kind of become another exercise. So for some of my students when I brought up this idea that we're going to write a book, we're going to publish stories and these are going to be your personal stories, and hopefully they're going to embody the spirit of the case that we've been learning about for the last month and a half. And then you're going to produce something amazing and it's going to be hard guys, and we're going to dig deep and we're going to write not one, not two, but four or five, six drafts.

Speaker 5 (00:16:24):

I think some of them were just kind of taken aback. Again, if we take a look at the demo of the school, it's an inner city school. It's almost a hundred percent Latino. Boyle Heights is a historically low s e s community. If anyone's ever seen the movie waiting for Superman, Roosevelt High School was actually featured on that back in the mid two thousands. So that's the kind of place that some of my kids are coming from. So to get these kids fired up about it, there was a lot of connection and meaning that hads to be made between the tutors. And I think you hit it on the head about how you have people, these outsiders professionals, professional writers, and perhaps not even necessarily writers, but people coming in that are not from the community and kids kind of being taken aback, but after some incredible work.

Speaker 5 (00:17:20):

And a two six was just masterful working with them. They started writing and it was just a collection of free writes. There was a topic, kids were given about six or seven prompts and the assignment was just right, just right. And I think anyone who's a writer knows that that's probably the hardest thing to do, just write. And when you are an 11th grade kid who's reading and writing at a fourth, fifth grade level, that's probably the hardest thing to do because you're so self-conscious. And the bottom line is that most 15, 16, 17 year olds that are slow, stubborn, recalcitrant riders do so not because they don't dig it, they're doing it because they've always been told, put a period here, you spell that wrong. It doesn't make sense. Awkward syntax. And I think when you've been told that over and over again, some of these kids are just, yeah.

Speaker 5 (00:18:15):

So that was step one. And then approaching that just with an open heart, open mind, I'm trying to speed up because it's such a long process, but after weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and many drafts and drafts and drafts and drafts and fact checking again, close to 60 kids produced these amazing stories. Some were long, some were short, some were very personal, some were fiction. We were very fortunate to partner up with industry professionals, people working in, I guess fields related to the kids. So immigration lawyers, Latino community activists, including Sylvia Mendez herself, the young girl at the center of the case. After that, the kids produced this amazing book and it was, it's

Speaker 4 (00:19:02):

Available at our song 1330. I say that, but we actually have the book, they're using it at U C L A and some courses for teachers to help them understand the schools and the students that they might be teaching in. So they're actually being, Stanford just bought up a bunch of these. So we do sell 'em on our time Travel Marts, and we do have 'em here, but they're actually books that are living on and being used in universities to help the next generation of teachers who are going to work in urban settings to understand the thoughts and the lives and the traumas that a lot of our youth are facing. And so that's another powerful element of this, is that it doesn't just live in this place. It's really allowing these students to open their stories to the world. And that's the beauty of the project in a lot of ways is that you're a published author. One joke we always say is that some of the volunteers who come in, I say, yeah, you're working with volunteers who've been trying to get their work published for years, and you're getting your book published in three months. So it's a pretty powerful thing for them to just feel that that honor and that confidence that comes from that when you see their parents and their siblings at the party at the end and they're celebrating their book. I mean, that is just the most heartwarming thing you'll see. So anyway,

Speaker 2 (00:20:09):

Can you talk a bit about our teacher finds Nana Rmo and how they might use in the classroom and work with you?

Speaker 3 (00:20:17):

Yeah, I was going to say, I just wanted to echo everything that you guys just said. Just as a precursor to that, I think the reason it works in the classroom, we get all these glowing testimonials and we do surveys, and 90% of the kids will say, Nana Rmo helped me become passionate about writing, or I'm a better writer because of Arimo. And when I'm asked why that is, I think it really hearkens back to what you were saying, Ben, is that I think the way that writing is so often taught is through this grammar and syntax and what you do. And Arimo is an opportunity for kids to jump in and just write with their passion to write about a topic that they actually choose. And agency that's an amazing entree into doing it is just deciding what I'm passionate about and what I want to write about, and I write about it in the way I want to write it, not worrying about mistakes.

Speaker 3 (00:21:06):

And so I think that that's where the learning really happened. Instead of entering the writing world, having to overcome all these obstacles, you enter the writing world with your passion, and then that's how you learn. And then by doing it. And so we actually formed the Young Writers Program. We just kept hearing about teachers doing it. They would write us, they did arimo themselves, and they had such a great experience. They brought it to their classrooms and they did it in their own way, but they kept asking us for support. And back then we were like a two person nonprofit, so it was hard to develop curriculum and workbooks and things like that. But we did it in 2006, we launched the Young Writers Program, and that was largely by building a website and by, I have the materials over there, but in the course of the last 10 years, we have workbooks for every grade level, elementary school, middle school, high school.

Speaker 3 (00:21:53):

They're all free. You can download them on the website or if you want to buy them, they're like $10 a piece. The curriculum is really important for us, and especially to be common core aligned. We actually have a tough time getting in schools because of the standardized tests, because of the whole educational environment. So we hear stories a lot of teachers have to fight, they have to really advocate to get it into their schools. But then on the other hand, we've heard of, once a teacher gets it in, we hear these stories like the kids are talking about their novels on the playground. They're asking to come in after school to write their novels. They're having fun doing it. It's meaningful to them. And I hear, I mean all this is anecdotally, but there's a school in Petaluma where they had such success that the principal wrote a novel with the kids.

Speaker 3 (00:22:35):

The teacher wrote a novel with the kids and then the whole school did it. So to have a whole school writing a novel together is just a magical creative moment so that we work really hard to make that happen more, and that's why we're expanding the program and building a whole new website this year. And so there are a variety of ways though. We are basically an organization that sets up an infrastructure of support. We have a tiny staff of eight people, but we reach these thousands of teachers largely because we provide them the materials to teach the way that they can in their schools. And so we do that. We have online, the new website will have a writing platform where teachers will be able to have virtual classrooms and monitor their kids' progress, and also to gamify writing to make it fun. So we have badges that kids earn at certain milestones.

Speaker 3 (00:23:19):

It's amazing how hard people work for online badges, and we provide stickers and things like that for certain milestones. So the kids compete with each other in a friendly way who's written the most? A lot of people say, well, if just writing the most is not quality writing, but just the act of writing and writing with such ambition teaches you how you get quality out of that. And then we have things like they can do word sprints or word count wars. So classrooms can actually, we could have a classroom in San Francisco doing a Word war with a classroom in LA and tracking their progress. And little like horse race, you'll see some kids' word count, go above the others, things like that. So yeah, there's a lot of word count tracking tools and fun stuff like that on the site. So your question was though, how do teachers find out about it? Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:24:05):

I would say a piece of this is how can people get involved with a school? I think a lot of times people are wondering, I want to help. I have resources, I have time. How do I connect? And I think for your program, it's like how does a teacher find out about you and then bring nano Rmo into the classroom.

Speaker 3 (00:24:26):

And I think one thing I left out is that we do have a teacher mentor program too, and teachers can connect with other teachers online to swap tips. So we're really, in the end, a community of writers. And so everything we do spawns out of that community. And so we want to do as much to support that and help teachers form their own writing community on our sites and in person.

Speaker 2 (00:24:48):

For Ben, how did you find out about 8 2 6 before and then was it difficult to bring 8 2 6 into the classroom? Our usual access is not through the principal, it's through a teacher.

Speaker 5 (00:25:00):

So I was lucky enough to have a friend, actually a really good friend of mine who's involved in A two six, and he connected me to the person down here who's at a two six. And we had a meeting about three years ago, actually an online meeting. And then as fate would have it a couple of years later, she reached out and said, Hey, I'm working on these two professors from Cal State la. Would you be interested in possibly having a meeting and seeing where this could possibly go? So we met up at a cafe in Boyle Heights, and we just kind of threw some ideas around, and I think everybody was on the same page, and that was the relationship there. But how do you bring it in the classroom? I think anything that gets kids to write, you have an open door at most high schools.

Speaker 5 (00:25:47):

I think anything that gets kids to write. So when I pitched this to my principal, he was like, go for it. This is great. It was a pretty easy process to get in. However, and I'm not sure if this will be addressed later, but the whole idea of bringing in people to classrooms and bringing programs to the classrooms, I think you brought up having classrooms of 40 when you were teaching and having a class of 10 is hard. Having a class of 20 is hard and trying to give them that one-on-one attention. So I think that was the value in a two six, that was the value in there. Getting those tutors in there and having those really amazing ratios, two, three students to a tutor was just amazing. It really gave the kids, I think that personalized attention that a lot of them really needed.

Speaker 5 (00:26:29):

So yeah, that was my introduction. And it's funny, but I'm not sure if anybody else, and here's an educator, but I think establishing those connections is vital. I mean, you have to establish those connections. In a city like la, there's so many nonprofits, and the bigger question is, how do we leverage these relationships with our community? I mean, how do we leverage it? I mean, there's so many good altruistic, passionate people. I mean, we're passionate about writing, and I think most people, if they have the time, they would be more than willing to go and give up an hour and a half, two hours of their week to work with cool kids. So I think how do we leverage those relationships with our community and with those resources that we have in a city like la second largest city and second largest school district in the US should be no reason why every kid shouldn't have a tutor. Next thing. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:27:26):

To go on that, some of the challenges for running an organization like this, I mean, the two biggest things that feed our organization are obviously funding and volunteer numbers. And yeah, what's amazing about H two six and what's always impressed me about H six is that it attracts incredible people. People who really want to get involved and want to make a difference or want to experience of connecting with young people in communities that in LA it's a very different landscape because kids aren't living necessarily side by side like in San Francisco, there's with some of that. But yeah, the numbers is always the challenge. The demand is very high for our programs. If we've had to limit our number of schools that we can work with to 15, we have the in-school project, and this is something we've just figured out over the years based on how many kids we can reach, how many volunteers we can recruit.

Speaker 4 (00:28:16):

There's an algorithm that we figured out on what makes the most sense, that we can actually provide the highest quality service that we can provide. So you're limited to how much you can do based on that. I mean, there's other resources that have to be put into finding people who can help you recruit more volunteers, and there's the training and then there's realities that they can't always come during the day to a school to help out. So there are some challenges. There's lots of schools that we really want to work with, but getting volunteers, there is a lot more of a challenge. This new project that we have in Manual Arts High School in South la, it's the oldest high school in Los Angeles. It's undergone a lot of changes and it's still going under changes, but it's very close to U S C. So for many years there was a project that students who were helping the school out, but because it's tough to continue that relationship unless there's somebody in between the liaison who can help make that connection work.

Speaker 4 (00:29:07):

So we've rebuilt that connection to U S C and we have this pipeline of students that come through now. And it's amazing because one of the big things we do at the beginning of the year is personal statement work where we're helping students who wanted to get into their Cal States or their ucs or whatever schools they want to go to, we help them create a personal statement and what better mentors than to have current college students come in and help you in that process of guiding. And for a lot of these students, that story is that one thing that will get them noticed because they may not have the same competitive grades or extracurricular activities that other students in other better off communities might have. And so these stories are where they really shine, but these stories are also an opportunity for them to dig deep and to really find that they aren't just like everybody else, that they have a very unique experience that that can really change other people's lives or understanding of who they are.

Speaker 4 (00:30:04):

But it also changes them and it becomes this process. And so you need adults who can really help build trust and to help the students feel like they have somebody that they can trust to convey these stories to and then to write them out. But the idea of sustaining these relationships is challenging because there is a lot of demand, but recruiting, retaining, training, volunteers to make sure that we can provide the services we need does become a challenge. And it's something we are always trying to work on how to deep, but having schools, and I'll end with this, but schools and teacher allies who are willing to make it easier for volunteers to come in is always going to make it work. We'd have to have our volunteers with TB test clearances. We have to make sure that they're fingerprinted. There's a lot that goes into making sure the volunteer is ready also for that classroom experience. So just throwing that out there.

Speaker 2 (00:30:57):

Let's talk a bit about retention, how you keep the relationship thinking for Nana Rmo, you have a classroom and it happens that one year. Does it happen again? And how do you maintain that relationship with the teacher for something that goes beyond the November to the next to keep that going?

Speaker 3 (00:31:17):

Yeah, it's interesting. That's a great question. And it's something we're working much more diligently and focused on. Our program is just wide open. So when I say that 2000 teachers did it across the nation last year, those are only the teachers who went to our website and ordered a classroom kit that we ship to them for free. So we basically know that there are many more doing it informally. And so yeah, retention's a key issue for us. And it's interesting because both of our organizations, how we rely on volunteers when, Joel, what did you say? You rely on the power of funding and volunteers. Yeah. So yeah, we're the same of course. And it is a lot of work, especially on the relationship level. I think in the end, we want to develop better pathways and just develop a website where that community exists, not just in the month of November, but it exists for the whole year.

Speaker 3 (00:32:06):

I think a lot of people look at us as an event instead of a year-round program, but we're really a year-round program, like the curriculum that we provide, it doesn't just focus on writing a novel in November. Some teachers start in September and it guides kids through how to prepare to write a novel and what they might like to write, and then writing the novel in November, and then it extends through revision. And also we have a publishing program where a lot of teachers, like their kids will exit with a final product. We have a sponsor every year who provides a free copy of a book to every student. I think in the end, it's about providing a great experience for the, and they will come back if they have that great experience and if it's meaningful to them and it's meaningful for their students.

Speaker 3 (00:32:44):

So I think we really focus on what we provide them. That's the best way. Since we're national and only have a staff of eight, we can't do the sort of hands-on work, but we're based in Berkeley, so we're very engaged in the schools who do it in the Bay Area. We do classroom visits and we have so many great writers who've come out of Nana Rmo and are very dedicated. And so we're trying to find a way to develop a program where we can place them in schools so that they can visit a school in LA or Washington dc but that's just beginning. So we really have, there are a lot of logistics to that that we have to figure out. So

Speaker 2 (00:33:15):

As you look at how you're trying to bring the community into the classroom and nonprofits to work with, what are some of the things like the wishlist of like, oh, I wish people would know. Great, you can come to me and if you want to volunteer, you could volunteer. Or

Speaker 5 (00:33:33):

I think there's an army of young kids and Icom kids are mid 20 year old kids, but coming out of teacher ed programs that are trying to figure out how to survive, I think especially in your first couple years, it's a different landscape and it's not like your master's or credentialing program. I'm not sure if you know this, but I actually started off at Manu Arts High School, taught right down the street on 41st and Vermont. And after reading works by Fre and Angela Valenzuela on Care Theory, the minute day one, I was like, wow, that just went out the window. It is different. It is just absolutely different. I think with teachers need is I think a clear way to find out those allies who exist and that are willing to lend their time. I think that's the biggest thing. I keep going back to the ratios. I probably should have said this before, but the two classes that worked on this book project, they were not AP students. This was not the AP class. And I think that was a good thing actually, because I think my AP students would've given me what they think I would've wanted to hear. Does that make sense? I think that's such an AP thing. You'll like this part. I doesn't

Speaker 2 (00:34:44):

Mean the college,

Speaker 5 (00:34:47):

It wasn't my honors class either. I mean, these were kids who probably should have been in ap. These were kids who had been held back. These are kids who had probation officers. These are kids who were in the foster care in the foster system. If you ever take a look at the book, Madison Ramirez, she's one of our authors. I mean, she has just this heartbreaking story and it's one of the most powerful stories. And when we did the reading, it was amazing. But having again, that ratio of two tutors to one, I think that was really what made it possible because as much as I would want, but my mind doesn't think that way. I think writers do. I love to write, Ryan and I, the person who connected me to 8 2 6, we used to write for a music magazine actually many moons ago. So I dig it, but I'm not sure how to teach that kind of writing to 11th graders. And if you've ever worked with high school kids, I think the motto of every high school kid needs to be the path of least resistance. I mean, that's a motto. I mean, the kids just want to do the least amount of possible to get their points and they're done. Call it a date.

Speaker 5 (00:35:59):

If you take a look at the first drafts of what my kids are writing, talk about an experience that was very impactful or hit you. And you'll have kids say, oh, once I was walking home on First Street and I got jumped and it sucked, period. And there's time story complete building the life and working with A two six. And I think the writing programs, I mean, it was to the point of just like, man writers think so differently. I mean, I would listen on the tutors and they'd be like, okay, okay, that's fine. It's fine. When you were walking on first Street, what did you smell? All of a sudden these mean by the end, the kids were riding stuff like was walking down the rundown streets of fur boil heights, and I could smell the smell of sandalwood mixed with corn tortillas coming from, you know what I mean?

Speaker 5 (00:36:57):

It was just amazing. I think that would not have been possible without that help from people who know how to write. I think that's really what strengthens these programs. So I think those are the needs that we need. And I think to go one step further with Nano Rmo, I want to sign up for one of these kids, I'm telling you right now, but manpower right now, it's a resource that you're sending out to high schools, a two six la You guys are so tied down with funding and volunteers going forward. The biggest thing that has to be, how does that become self-sustaining, right? I mean, that's a question. How does that become, I have a four-year-old and he doesn't know how to read, but he's in the process of letters and all the good stuff he loves. When I read to him and we read together and he has this book on planes, and I'd become an A two six tutor because I tell him to tell me the story and we look at the pictures and he goes, so dusty, he's flying. And I'm like, all right buddy, what's he feeling?

Speaker 5 (00:38:02):

So Dusty's, so excited. He wants to run the race. And it's funny because now I've taken that and I've become that tutor almost, and when my students are writing now, I'm telling them, alright guys, listen, I see what you wrote by your analysis of the explosion of the Maine, let's go further now. I mean, I think that's empowered me as a teacher and how I talk about writing. Again, kids are always about the path of least resistance and whether it's a personnel issue or whether it's funding, I think the programs and what the work that you guys are doing with schools, there's a spillover effect that lasts and keeps going and going and going. This year we're doing something again on a much smaller scale, and we're talking about maybe just four tutors for an entire class, and eventually I'd like to get good enough to be able to do some of this on my own. So I think that would be the need, how to leverage that help and find those resources.

Speaker 4 (00:39:03):

That's great. But there've been some teachers we've worked with who've taken it on as their own project and who've kept some relationships with the volunteers. We have one teacher at A L c, Andy Molnar who's been doing a book publishing project year after year on his own. We provide some support and resources, but he's figured out how to do this and with all these online publishing tools as well, it's made the process even easier. Just getting the funding is always the challenge, but once you get that sort of mechanism of getting the students into the rhythm of doing these kinds of projects, making it part of your curriculum as well, so you're not deviating, that really can happen. And I've heard glad to hear that. The challenge is keeping those volunteers and you can do a great deal with four volunteers. You just have to have them outside maybe, and you send out a few kids at a time to get that one-on-one attention for 15 minutes, even each. And we're finding this at our writer's room in manual arts as well as sending half the class in to get some support for maybe four or five volunteers at a time, and then switching it out. It gives the teachers more time to focus also on maybe what they're trying to teach. So those are the challenges, but it also the successes that are possible through those kinds of strong collaborations.

Speaker 2 (00:40:10):

So collaboration, the word everyone is using, especially in the nonprofit world's, like, oh, you all collaborate, why don't you collaborate? But let's talk about that. Right? Let's just talk about, to me probably the thing that's a buzzword, but actually we should be doing it more in the nonprofit community of how to collaborate. And I know 8, 2, 6 6, we've done work with Nano Rima where our 8 2 6 and y New York chapter has actually done with their writing students after school a novel. You could talk about how you might be able to collaborate and then how that collaboration can benefit a school and how people can jump into that collaboration. So let's start with the first one. How can nonprofits collaborate effectively?

Speaker 3 (00:40:50):

That's a big

Speaker 2 (00:40:50):

Question. That's a big question. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:40:52):

You're the first one I called. As I said, I think it is tough for nonprofits. I mean, Gerald Knight, every time we get together, we look for ways to do things together and with scarce resources, it's really tough for us just to achieve our mission and create the impact in the world that we want to do. At the same time though, we know that working together we can do a lot more for us. I think it's in part just because we don't do so much hands-on work, it is about getting out the word and building awareness and sort of collaborating in this. I mean, even our meeting yesterday, we went to this lit meeting. A lot of people trivialize writing and especially creative writing as if it doesn't have any impact in the world. But I think everything that Ben and Joel were talking about, when you write your story and put it into the world, it transforms you and the world.

Speaker 3 (00:41:43):

That's really important. We need more voices in the world. And so I think it's like we share that common mission. We got to constantly make that case that creativity has impact. It's not just about science, technology and engineering and math. I read a statistic that 75% of scientists became scientists because they read science fiction when they were young, science fiction opened up their minds to imagination, to other worlds, and then now they're exploring those other worlds in a different way in the lab instead of on the page. But they intersect. They compliment each other. But then I think there is the bigger logistical question, the everyday question and managing a nonprofit, we can do a hundred things and they all make sense and they're all great. So we just have to choose very selectively what makes the most sense, how we're going to focus our resources on doing something well.

Speaker 3 (00:42:28):

And so yeah, that's why I called Gerald at the beginning because 8, 2, 6 shares our mission and our spirit so closely. So I just always like to think, Hey, something good is going to happen eventually. We're going to work together in a fantastic way today. Or I think your chapters, we each operate by giving other people the power to implement it in their local communities in the way that works for them. So I think there's a way for Nana RMA to work in different chapters in different ways, whether it's like an afterschool program or something that they kind of sponsor as a challenge in their chapter. I don't know. There are a lot of different ways to do it. So it's just about, I think having this discussion and being open to collaboration and not being so much about this is us. We want all this attention for what we do. At some point, you just have to open up and say, no, we're going to work together and it's going to all work out.

Speaker 4 (00:43:15):

Yeah, I love just what the digital realm just offers you in that aspect where you can reach lots of kids in a way that doesn't require too much on the other side too. But I think that for us, collaborations with great projects like yours, but also even the volunteer piece being such a big part for us, I think collaborations with universities have been very strong. A lot of teachers and professors are now assigning volunteering for our organization as part of their curriculum. So there's even service learning components where students can be paid to come in and work with our students, and sometimes you'll get volunteers, students who are just coming in to do it, but then they can't help but get captivated by these funny great kids who just find a way to make the students feel guilty if they don't come back the next week or whatever else.

Speaker 4 (00:44:03):

I was just talking to a volunteer yesterday who's like, I'm embarrassed I wasn't able to come in last week, and the twins, they're going to give me so much crap for not being there. It's like the students really build these relationships with the volunteers, but collaborations with the universities is key. I think for our success. We do a lot of collaborations, corporations, a lot of times corporations really want to send volunteers into these projects, and some do, but it's challenging. Obviously, you can't send folks during the work week, and that's when we need the most help. A lot of corporations want to do things on day sort of things like come in and send 500 people, send 500 people in. We're going to paint and finish your place. It's not always what we need. We try to figure out ways to make it work, but those are kinds of the collaborations that have been working for us and with other nonprofits as well, figuring out maybe how to put our resources together to make something possible and the costs of publishing a book.

Speaker 4 (00:44:48):

There are other organizations that maybe could help on that and those aspects, but I think that the process of writing and what you guys do is fantastic. Just getting students to just jump in there. I love the word count thing. I remember I used to tell my students when I was teaching because it was very reluctant writers and reluctant a lot of things, but just to finish a page of writing was a success. And that to show that you've exercised that muscle to be able to write that much, and then you're just going to get more and more, you're get stronger in that thing. I love how you guys do that through nmo, but I do think that finding partnerships and collaborations that do make sense, we all do have our own strategic plans. We have our own goals, we have our own staffs and teams and resources, and just finding those that really make the most sense are going to help us the most.

Speaker 2 (00:45:33):

I'm going to open up for questions,

Speaker 6 (00:45:37):

So I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how these kinds of partnerships might work in online modalities if there are opportunities.

Speaker 2 (00:45:50):

The question is about partnerships in online or non-traditional, not classroom partnerships.

Speaker 3 (