Hello to everyone who helped make last year's Youth Writing Adventure such a successful and meaningful experience for so many students. 

We are currently developing a second round of this unique opportunity for young writers and we hope that you will consider supporting this program once again.

Please check out this year's campaign page by clicking this link: http://bit.ly/2kbdYjM

Thank you all once again. 

It is a pleasure to share with gratitude and excitement some of the successes so far and some memorable moments of our Youth Writing Adventure. On Tuesday morning, March 15th we welcomed 130 students and 17 teachers in the lobby of Bartlett Hall at the University of Massachusetts. The highlights and memorable moments began immediately as the first group rolled in at 8:45 and continued throughout the day until the last group rolled out just after 2:00. We each walked away from the day impacted in our own personal ways but the lasting affects we’ll have in common. Here are some of my favorite moments:

• Observing the expressions and interactions exchanged as participants arrived, received their packets and enjoyed some cider and doughnuts before the morning assembly, ranging from excitement to unease, curiosity to crankiness, giddiness to gratitude, or confident to confused.
• While writing into the day during the morning assembly, I stopped writing for a moment, looked up and was struck by the scene of the large group of people writing and reflecting silently-- Students, age 9 to 16, along with their teachers and workshop leaders, from urban, suburban, rural, public, charter and private schools, in the same room, on the same task, with shared purposes.
• Taking pictures of fully engaged students in the workshops.
• Witnessing wide eyes, full plates and huge smiles seen throughout the UMass dining hall as students enjoyed, what the Princeton Review has rated, the second-best campus food in the nation.
• The supportive cheers and respectful attention of nearly two hundred audience members, as more than a dozen brave and proud young writers shared portions of their work from the stage of the auditorium.

Each student participated in two of the following workshop offerings. Revised and polished pieces sparked by these workshops have been steadily pouring in before the April 1st submission deadline.

• Short stories
• Scriptwriting
• Poetry inspired by injustice
• Description focused fiction
• Narratives for awareness & activism
• Songwriting in response to learning

Our efforts have received some positive attention from the press. Here is a link to the Hampshire Gazette cover article of our event, followed by a link to a recent editorial response:

http://www.gazettenet.com/News/Local/-Youth-Writing-Adventure--revived-after-10-year-absence-708634

http://www.gazettenet.com/Opinion/Editorials/Return-of-the-write-stuff-for-area-students-1217033.

We sincerely thank you all again for your generosity and support for our youth writing program. We will update again with details about the publication process, completion and distribution. 

Check out this slideshow of pictures from our adventure: 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OSava14YDKu3XlEL3Tzmh48YwQGemw9jMH2kShDjYDg/edit?usp=sharing

Happy Spring!

Sincerely,

Justin Eck

WMWP Co-director

Youth Writing Programs

Thank you all once again for your generous donations and for spreading the word to help us to raise $4,005 for our youth writing program. Thanks to you, our campaign achieved the greatest number of donations than any other MinuteFund project to date! 

We are grateful and excited to have raised enough funding to host over 100 young writers, and support five teachers to lead writing workshops for an influential adventure at UMass this March. 

We will update you later with info, photos, and success stories of the program before sending along the perks and final thanks. 

Thanks again for helping to make a positive impact on students and their growth in writing. 

Sincerely, 

Justin Eck, Bruce Penniman & WMWP

With just three days left, we are hopeful that some more folks will donate what they can in the final countdown. We believe that this writing program will have positive and lasting impacts on students and their experience with writing. Thanks to our anonymous donor, who will continue matching donations until the end of the campaign, we need to raise just a little more than $1000 to reach our goal. We are almost there! We are grateful for all the generosity and support throughout this campaign so far. We look forward to keeping everyone updated throughout the next phases of this Youth Writing Program. 

Since the announcement two weeks ago that an anonymous donor had offered to match all future contributions to the campaign, we have received $500 in new gifts, all of which have been doubled to move us $1,000 closer to the goal of $5,000. A big THANK YOU to everyone who has supported the Youth Writing project!

We're ten days from the end of our campaign now - it ends on January 15, and we have a little over $2,000 left to raise. Please spread the word to friends and colleagues and businesses that might be willing to support this program.

We're looking forward to moving into the implementation phase and bringing busloads of area middle school students to UMass for an inspiring day of learning, writing, sharing, and experiencing a college campus. We know that this event will be transformative for many of them.

Thank you again for your support!

We are thrilled and thankful to announce an exciting new development! While mentioning the shared belief of the impacts this project can make on young writers, and to encourage further giving, we received a generous pledge to match dollar for dollar every contribution made from December 22, 2015, until the close of our campaign on January 15, 2016, or until our goal is reached. 

We appreciate all the generosity and support towards this project and our goal. And we are pleased to share the good news that all contributions going forward will be doubled thanks to this generous pledge.

Thanks to the donors who have joined the growing roster of contributors to the WMWP Youth Writing Workshop MinuteFund drive in the past week! We now have almost 30 contributors, and we're very grateful to all of you. We have just past the one-third mark toward our fundraising goal, and we're a third of the way into the campaign, so we're on track.

Here's another poem from a previous WMWP youth publication. It seems poignant given the recent climate accord in Paris:

Promises

People say the can but they won't

People say they will but they don't

They try and try but they do not succeed

Why does the world make promises they cannot keep

Causing things to die.

If the world would just try

Not to lie

Then people and things would not cry or die.

--Brittany Morris, Grade 6

  Thornton W. Burgess Middle School, Hampden

The WMWP Youth Writing Workshop MinuteFund campaign is one week old today, and thanks to two dozen generous donors, we have reached the 30% mark toward our goal of raising $5,000!

Thank you to everyone who has helped get this project off to such a great start. Please help us keep the momentum going by sharing the link with your friends and colleagues by e-mail or Facebook. Also think about businesses that your frequent that might be willing to help. Here is the direct link to the campaign page: https://minutefund.umass.edu/youthwriting.

Here's a sample of student writing from a previous WMWP publication. It speaks to the empowerment students feel when sharing their creative work:

On Stage

Whoosh!

Stage curtains open

An audience lurks

As a big city.

On the stage I am

Transformed.

No longer Nora, schoolgirl,

Leading an ordinary life, but

A jet roaming the streets

Of New York

On the West Side

Lights are

Lava.

A super silence sweeps

Over the crowd.

Piano keys twinkle.

My voice becomes a griot,

An African storyteller,

Weaving a tapestry

Telling a story.

Butterflies replace

My feet

A great surge of happiness wells up inside me.

Oh! To be on stage.

--Nora McCloskey, Grade 7   

   Herberg Middle School, Pittsfield