September Community Outreach
Dear Friends of Project Write Now:
WOW! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! 💙
The gratitude vibe is flowing for all who made our CringeFest 2024 fundraising event such a HUGE success! As you know, all of the proceeds raised from this night support our community outreach programs.
Thank you to our incredible performers—Michelle Akin, Israel Elias Colón, Tina Goodyear, Chris Harrison, and Alix Hayes—for bravely taking the stage and sharing such funny and heart-warming stories. Congratulations to Chris Harrison for winning BOTH the Judges’ and People’s Choice awards! 🎤🥇
Thank you to our PWN team and all our volunteers for helping the event run so smoothly! 👏
Thank you to our sponsors for your GENEROUS donations. We are so grateful to all the individuals and local businesses who not only supported this event but also our mission! 👏
And thank you to all who came out and PACKED the house. Our event would not have been as AMAZING without your presence, your laughter, and your applause! 👏
Be sure to follow us on social media to see more photos and videos!
Instagram: @projectwritenow
Facebook: @projectwritenow
Tik Tok: @project.write.now
Thank you again SO MUCH! 💙
With love & gratitude,
Here’s what else we’ve been up to this month. If you are interested in bringing a program to your school or organization, email executive director Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.
Academy Charter High School (Lake Como)
From poetry to storytelling, we’ve been enjoying playing with words this month at Academy Charter High School. Students wrote and shared about their experiences with the recent earthquake and solar eclipse. Perhaps most notably, the students enjoyed receiving roses and writing self-love poems, using the instrumental to the song “Can I Call You Rose?” as background inspiration. Our eight-week program concluded on the 30th with a storytelling activity. We hope to be back writing with these students again next year.
Asbury Park High School
- 11th Grade Dream Academy
We switched gears slightly with the 11th grade Dream Academy students. Our focus now is turned toward coming up with story ideas to begin drafting our college essays. We did some initial brainstorming activities and will be working with students one-on-one for the remainder of the year.
- Values & Vision
We finished this year’s Values & Vision work at APHS by building an understanding of the job search and networking strategies. Students investigated potential employers and how they can connect with those companies before working for them. We have enjoyed being a part of these students’ final high school year and wish them the best as they move onto their next adventures.
- The Spoken Word Project
With the students in The Spoken Word Project at APHS, we’ve been celebrating Poetry Month—from haikus to spoken word. The students enjoyed creating their own poems using beach-themed poetry magnets, as well as writing about their experiences with the recent solar eclipse and earthquake. We are also getting ready for our Writers Celebration and publication of our end-of-year anthology.
We are grateful for our partnership with Asbury Park High School!
Big Brothers Big Sisters
This month we were at Monmouth University, facilitating a session for Big Brothers Big Sisters, where Asbury Park High School student mentees were paired with university students as mentors. We celebrated poetry and storytelling alike with a word circle, writing prompts, and group sharing. This was our final session with BBBS for the school year and we are so grateful to BBBS for inviting us to be a part of their program.
Lunch Break Womyn’s Worth
It was so wonderful to be part of the Womyn’s Worth Celebration, which took place on Saturday, April 6, at Lunch Break. Women in the current program shared their final projects to the cheers of the supporters in the crowd, including alumni of the program. Several women shouted out Project Write Now as being so instrumental in their ability to share their stories. A special thank you to Pamela Major and Gwendolyn Love for inviting Project Write Now to be a part of this incredible program!
Lunchtime Write-In
On Fridays, we host a one-hour writing workshop on Zoom during which we write in response to themed prompts. This month, we explored the themes “Walk” and “Poetry.” Though writers never have to share, we always enjoy hearing one another’s pieces and have formed an incredible, supportive community. Join us for our next Lunchtime Write-In to see what our upcoming themes will be!
NEA Big Read at Middletown Township Public Library
We were so excited to be invited to the Middletown Township Public Library this month for their NEA Big Read event around mythology writing! We began by talking about some of our favorite myths, and then we brainstormed some ideas for myths of our own. Once our ideas were down, we gave our students specific myth writing tips to help amplify their stories. We loved what they came up with and we can’t wait to be back again next month to do another workshop for adults on May 9! You can register here.
Parker Elementary STEAMpark
With the students at Parker Elementary, we played a game called the “writing hunt for baby chicks.” The game captured the art of storytelling through team building exercises, writing prompts, arts and crafts. We wrote stories that included teachable lessons, we created and designed our baby chicks, and we shared our stories and baby chick pictures. We were thrilled that there was 100% participation—imagination hatched and filled the lines of the paper! We’re so proud of all our writers, our stories, and our baby chicks.
Poetry & Plants
We had so much fun kicking off National Poetry Month in the greenhouse at Kula Urban Farm this month for Poetry & Plants! This was a first for most folks there. It was amazing to witness how people stepped out of their comfort zones to share their words, some for the first time ever, largely for their love of writing. We’re so grateful to Kula for sharing their amazing space and being such awesome hosts and to all who came and participated, sharing their hearts and words. We’re taking a break from Poetry & Plants this summer and will return in October for the fall edition.
PWN Teen Voice & Verse Celebration & Open Mic
We had a BLAST this month in our PWN Teen Voice & Verse Celebration & Open Mic! This special open mic featured the inspiring winners from our 2024 writing contest, Voice & Verse. Be sure to check out our recap video as PWN Teen Ambassador and contest judge, Alex Lindgren, runs through each winner and why they were selected, and some winners even came to read their pieces, too! You can read all of the winning pieces at bridgeink.org. Congratulations again to our 2024 Voice & Verse winners!
PWN India (children)
We began writing with a new group of students in India these past six weeks. We met on Zoom every Monday and started our hour off by writing about something that matters to us. We wrote personal stories for the first two classes and then moved into fictional writing. We used Mo Willems as a mentor author and looked at how he used speech bubbles in his books to make his characters come alive. We had fun spinning our own personal stories into more fictional ones with fun characters who had a problem that needed to be solved. We learned how to move our fictional stories along by using dialogue, action, and inner thinking. We learned about catchy leads to hook our readers and shared pictures we drew of our fun characters. Everyone loved sharing their stories with the class!
Red Bank Regional High School Outside the Box: Art and Journaling Club
At RBR this month, we took cool art supplies and created pieces using the prompt, “imagine this.” We became creative telling stories from the original crafts we made. We also played “Puzzle and Words,” our fill-in-the-blanks writing game. The writers became creative coming up with words that had the exact amount of letters to fill in the poetry lines. Then midway, we exchanged our writing pieces with our peers so they could finish our lines for us. It was a great way to write a collective poem through suspense. April is also Diversity Month, a time to recognize and celebrate the beauty of our unique cultures, backgrounds, and traditions, so we also wrote about what diversity means to us. Some answers included: “To be different but beautiful.” “To be different and go against the norm.” “Standing out in a crowd of multiple skin tones, cultures, and growing in one.” Our theme was “Speak Up and Speak Out,” using our voices, our pens, our sketch sticks, and our creative expressions designing our own diversity campaign posters.
Red Bank Middle School
- 7th & 8th Grade AVID (in-school)
We celebrated National Poetry Month with our 7th & 8th grade RBMS AVID students with a reading of “What Does Poetry Save You From?” by Linda Pastan and “For a Robot” by Alison Bailey. We wrote about what poetry is to us, how we benefit from it, and what we feel it saves us from. We also wrote about what we feel we “need” in order to write a poem. Then we switched into revision mode as we are getting closer to the end of the school year and we’re thinking about our final pieces for our end-of-year anthologies. Time flies when you’re having fun!
- 6th Grade AVID (in-school)
This month we worked with another cycle of 6th grade AVID students at Red Bank Middle School. We did ekphrastic writing (writing inspired by art) and began by reading “For a Robot” by Alison Bailey. Next we looked at the art that inspired the poem—“Yellow Flowers” by Carla Paton—and made a list on the board of all of the things that the art evoked for us. We used that list to inspire new original stories and poems.
- 4th/5th Grade AVID (in-school)
The 4th and 5th grade AVID students are busy thinking about how important their voice is and ways they can voice their opinion to make a difference in the world. We read the book “Say Something!” by Peter Reynolds and discussed what it is that we feel so strongly about that we want to shout it to the world. We used prompts like “I imagine … I believe … I wish … and I feel strongly …” to write about things that are important to us. Students wrote about bullying, homelessness, animal cruelty, inflation, how important recess is because it’s good exercise, social time with friends, and much more. Like Peter Reynolds says in his book, we all have a voice and we need to use it to make a difference in the world.
Shore House (Long Branch)
Writers listened to, discussed, and wrote their own poems (and created some illustrations) in response to five featured poems! This work was inspired by National Poem In My Pocket Day (April 18th). The featured poems were “Do Not Trust The Eraser” by Rosamond S. King, “Still Here” by Langston Hughs, “Where you are, Is Not Who You Are,” by Circumstances, “I Sat In The Sun” by Jan Hirshfield, and “Snow” by Shel Silverstein. We loved seeing the responses along with the images!
Teen Writing Space
We love listening in to our Teen Writing Space every Thursday. Yes, you heard that right. We listen in because this space is entirely run by our teens and PWN Teen ambassadors! With Alex as our current teen leader, the students have been working together to come up with inspirational lesson plans that tap into every students’ strengths. One of our favorite lessons was around “ode” writing. One student who typically doesn’t share finally opened up with a gorgeous ode to Taylor Swift! Another student has been writing (and illustrating!) brilliant fan fiction. And all of the students have been connecting over fantasy worlds new and previously established. Join us this summer for an in-person version of Teen Writing Space at the Woman’s Club of Red Bank!
Two River Theater Untold Stories
In collaboration with the Two River Theater, we facilitated an Untold Stories workshop on Saturday, April 20, between performances of A Thousand Maids. We used Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Valentine for Ernest Mann” to reflect and write about the stories that are in and around us. Then we used Joy Harjo’s “Remember” to write lists of memories. We discovered so many connections in the sharing of these stories and participants left feeling “fed,” “inspired,” “grateful,” “energized,” and “heard.” Thank you to the Two River Theater for inviting us to be a part of this event.
Write Out Loud
We are so grateful to all who came to write and share with us at the Asbury Book Cooperative this month for Write Out Loud! After a conversation about two recent pretty big world events—the earthquake and the solar eclipse—we channeled our thoughts into writing and shared our experiences. Then we opened the floor to anyone who brought in outside work to share, as well, beginning with a share of the LOVE IS collaborative community poem we put together through the month of February. Be sure to join us for the next Write Out Loud on May 14!
Scholarship Seats
Through our mission as a nonprofit organization, we remove barriers to participating in our fee-based classes by providing full and partial scholarship seats as well as payment plans. Since 2020, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the need for financial assistance and therefore have met that need by offering more scholarship seats. For 2023, we awarded 48 seats totaling $17,205. For 2023, we have already provided 28 seats totaling $8,715.50. For information about our scholarship program or to become a valuable donor providing these seats, please email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.
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