october community outreach

Red Bank Middle School: This month, to help generate ideas in our notebooks, we focused our weekly writing workshops with our 7th and 8th grade AVID students on topics we are familiar with and places that are special to us. We kicked off the month drafting stories about our names and the impact they have on our lives after reading “My Name” from The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros.

september community outreach

We LOVE the start of a new school year! It was a short month, but we accomplished a lot …
Red Bank Middle School: We are so excited to be back writing with the 7th and 8th grade AVID students at RBMS! Our 8th graders were thrilled to see us again–some even ran up to give us hugs and high fives! And the 7th graders seemed just as happy to start writing with us. …

celebrating five years!

Five years ago this month, we opened our doors with a bold plan: to help people become better writers. We had one small classroom on the second floor of a cool, industrial-style building in Red Bank and a staff of four. We were excited to share our mission and our passion for writing. At the time, we had no idea how life-changing the writing experiences would be⁠—not only for our students but also for our own organization.

august community outreach

Summer is coming to an end, and although we are sad to say goodbye to students in our summer programs, we are excited for the new school year. We are gearing up to head back to our Tuesday writing sessions at Red Bank Middle School and our Monday afternoon program with the 21st Century Community Learning Center in Long Branch. And we are ready to provide college essay support to select groups at Red Bank Regional, Long Branch High School, and the Poseidon Early College High School.

july community outreach

We can’t believe July is over! We have been so busy with our summer programs, we’ve hardly had a chance to remember that it is, in fact, SUMMERTIME! Here’s a little of what we’ve been up to: Teen Internship Program: Teaching Assistants: During training, our teaching assistant interns created lesson plans to teach in our summer programs. But first, they practiced those lessons on us and one another!

june community outreach

The end of the school year is always bittersweet. We have to say goodbye to the students we’ve been writing with throughout the year. At Red Bank Middle School, we get to see the culmination of their hard work both in the publication of their writing in anthologies and through our Writers Celebration. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with these talented young writers!