October Community Outreach

Dear Friends of Project Write Now:

We are still in awe of the magic we experienced last week at our 11th Anniversary Community Celebration at Two River Theater!

The laughter, the stories, the energy—all of it reminded us of the importance of our work. 

Now more than ever, we need community. We need spaces where people feel seen, heard, and valued.

Coming together to share stories isn’t a luxury—it’s essential. It’s how we remind ourselves of our shared humanity and how we build deeper connections, fostering greater compassion, empathy, and hope.

That’s why we’ve launched our “11 Years, One Community” campaign—to raise $11,000 by 11/11 to keep our expressive writing programs thriving. These programs are vital lifelines for youth, adults, and educators who rely on the power of storytelling to find connection, courage, and hope.

We are 54 percent of the way to our goal! But we need your support!

No gift amount is too big or small. Every dollar will be put to good use to help continue funding our vital community outreach programming.

Thank you for keeping the stories—and the community we’ve built together—going strong.

With love & gratitude,
The Project Write Now Team

Here’s what else we’ve been up to this month. If you are interested in bringing a community outreach program to your school or mission-based organization, email Meredith Avakian, Director of Community Outreach & Engagement, at meredith@projectwritenow.org.

Asbury Park Public Library Youth Journaling Club 

The fall edition of our Youth Journaling Club just wrapped at Asbury Park Public Library. For the past couple of months, we thoroughly enjoyed weekly drop-in sessions with middle school students and beyond. Most students noted how much they loved having some quiet, introspective time to express themselves on paper. We’re very much looking forward to returning in a few months with this weekly offering.

Lunch Break – Community Playmaking

We are so excited to return to Lunch Break for another round of Community Playmaking, in collaboration with Two River Theater. We have five playwrights returning from last year and four new participants. After spending the first session generating ideas, we dove into characters to begin figuring out who will be in our 10-minute plays. The performance by professional actors—cast and directed by Two River Theater—is scheduled for Monday, December 15, beginning at 5 p.m., at Lunch Break. Please save the date to join us for this incredible community program!

Lunchtime Write-In (In-Person)

We’re thrilled to launch an in-person, weekly Lunchtime Write-In series at our office in Red Bank with a group of local women who are unhoused, providing a supportive space for them to express themselves freely and without judgement. Each week, the women are offered lunch, writing prompts, arts and crafts exercises, as well as a chance to share. The deep, vulnerable sharing has been incredibly moving, reminding us why supportive spaces like this are vitally important.

Lunchtime Write-In 

Every Friday, writers meet on Zoom to write and share our stories. This month, we explored the themes: “Brick,” “Ten,” “Loud,” “Ctrl, Alt, Del,” and photo prompts for Halloween. We love the writing community that has formed in this weekly group. Join us for our next Lunchtime Write-In to see what our upcoming theme will be!

Morning Pages 

This month, committed writers met in Morning Pages for an hour every weekday, from 8 to 9 a.m. ET, to write together. Want to join us? Sign up for November’s Morning Pages and write with us any weekday through the month!

PWN India (Children)

We are continuing our work with students in India this fall. We started with a new group of smiling faces in October, and although we have only had three sessions so far, the students have really opened up and are eager to write and share their stories each week. We meet on Zoom every Wednesday and start our hour off by writing about something that matters to us, like family or friends or an event at school. Our theme for the six weeks is personal writing with a focus on story elements to help us tell our stories in organized and creative ways. So far, we have tried to incorporate setting into our leads and used feelings, inner thinking, and dialogue to help develop the characters in our stories. We look forward to picking a story idea to plan out with a beginning, middle, and end so we can actually write our story and add pictures across pages like a real book. Stay tuned for some samples of what our students are writing in our next newsletter!

PWN India (Adults)

We are back journaling with a group of adult writers in India. After spending some time talking about all the celebrations for Diwali, we wrote in response to the poem “Un Mango Grows in Kansas” by Huascar Medina. We love connecting during this time (morning for us, evening for them) each week.

Red Bank Middle School AVID 

We are so happy to be back at Red Bank Middle School to write with the 7th and 8th grade AVID classes for our ELEVENTH year in a row! We kicked off the year by reading a letter written personally from our instructor to the students, and then inviting the students to write letters back to us. In their letters, they could share anything they wanted us to know about themselves. We handed out notebooks and stickers so the students could decorate their notebooks to reflect their individual identities. We read “Why I Write” by Terry Tempest Williams and wrote our own reasons for writing, and then we strung our favorite lines together into collaborative class poems. We wrote about our identities, including the titles we hold, our passions, our accomplishments, our goals, and more. We wrote letters to our future selves that we will not open until the end of the school year. And we celebrated Halloween by reading “Ghost” by Cynthia Huntington and writing our own ghost stories. We can’t wait to hear all the stories this year will bring out!

Red Bank Middle School PWN Creative Expression Club 

We kicked off our after-school writing program on Mondays at Red Bank Middle School with 6th-8th grades. We’ve shared some of our favorite things, making a list of our greatest likes, and using that list as our first writing prompt together. One writer shared a piece about her pet rabbit, another about their dog. We celebrated Indigenous People’s Day by reading “Remember” by Joy Harjo and writing about our favorite memories, what we want people to remember about us, and what we want people to remember generally about the world. We read “The Naming of Cats” by T. S. Eliot and wrote about our own names and names that are significant to us. We read the short story “Who’s in my bed?” and we tried scaring each other by writing the scariest stories in the room. And we have been art journaling, using cut-outs from magazines and newspapers as launching boards for new ways of expression.

Red Bank Middle School – PWN Play It Forward SInging & Songwriting

Our Play It Forward program is once again up and running at the Woman’s Club in downtown Red Bank! This fall, Red Bank Regional High School student Sasha Perskie has invited several other Performing Arts Academy students to help her with this special music program, along with songwriting instructor Mimi Cross. Sasha started Play It Forward several years ago, and in the past the focus has been on piano. But this semester’s sessions have songwriting at their center. The class is working on their first group song now, and when it’s complete, students will begin individual songs that they’ll finish up at home. Play It Forward is offered at no cost to participants, and based around the idea that older, more experienced students who have had the opportunity to study music will pass along what they’ve learned to new, younger music students. At Play It Forward, we pay it forward!

Red Bank Regional ML Class

We are proud to have begun weekly writing workshops with the Multi-Language class at Red Bank Regional. So far, we have decorated notebooks and written about what we like the most, including our favorite places, foods, traditions, hobbies, memories, and more. We’ve also celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month by reading “A House Called Tomorrow” by Alberto Ríos and writing off of the lines: “All the yous that you have been” (past), “You are made” (present), and “everything we require to keep going” (future). We can’t wait to see what these next few weeks will bring!

Red Bank Regional “Outside the Box” Club

We are thrilled to be back at Red Bank Regional High School this year to kick off our Outside the Box Journaling & Art Club! For our first session of the year, we welcomed 33 students from grades 9-11. Together, students dove into a creative check-in activity, using writing and art to explore unspoken thoughts, dreams, goals, ideas, and possibilities they want to step into this year. The activity sparked meaningful conversations about self-expression, support, and the importance of having a space where emotions and creativity can be shared openly. As we wrapped up, students added their voices to our heart-shaped posters, expressing what they hope to gain from this club: “Self-care, reflection, expressing emotions, building community, being more social, improving writing skills, and learning more about themselves.” We can’t wait to continue creating, writing, and growing together each session!

Shore House

At Shore House, we have been opening our workshops with a sound bowl meditation. We’ve read “Stormchaser” by JeFF Stumpo and used the idea of the poem as a writing prompt, taking commonly used phrases in our own lives and spinning them into new phrases that better fit our messages. We’ve also read Maya Angelou’s “Letter to Her Younger Self” and one of WanderLust’s “Open Letter to Your Future Self” as models to write letters to both our pasts and futures.

Teacher Writing Collaborative

We kicked off our 2025-2026 monthly Teacher Writing Collaborative program by coming together on Zoom for a quiet evening of writing and reflection. We read “Un Mango Grows In Kansas” by Huascar Medina, using the words, lines, images, memories, and emotions that resonated the most to inspire our writing.

Teen Free Write

Teens came together on Zoom for one hour this month to hold themselves accountable to their writing projects. Some worked on personal creative pieces like poetry and flash; others worked on their college essays and school projects. We are looking forward to our next Teen Free Write on November 12. Join us!

Teen Writing Space

We kicked off this session of Teen Writing Space with an incredible group of teen writers coming together on Zoom. We read “This Is Not a Horse” by Blas Falconer and used it as a writing prompt, pulling lines and ideas that resonated into new original works. We used our favorite songs as writing prompts. We spent one class writing only about Halloween things—including skeletons, nightmares, and cats. We read “A House Called Tomorrow” by Alberto Ríos and wrote about the houses we imagine for our futures (both literal and figurative). And we read “Ghost” by Cynthia Huntington and “Halloween Party” by Kenn Nesbitt and then used lines from the poems as prompts. Our last class is November 20—you still have time to join us before this session ends!

Write Out Loud

We had a spooky Write Out Loud event this month at the Asbury Book Cooperative. After checking in with the costumes we felt best represented us, we read “The Witch’s Daughter” by Joan Murray to set the tone. Then we pulled from a bag of “treats” (which were slips of paper with words related to Halloween) and used them as writing prompts. We went around and shared new work as well as outside pieces we brought in. There were lots of chilling ghost stories and we still feel a bit haunted (in the best way). Join us for our next Write Out Loud event in November!

YMCA (Red Bank) 

We have been hosting weekly generative writing classes at the Red Bank YMCA. We read Beth Alvarado’s “History” and talked about the objective correlative. We tried using objects (like our clothes, jewelry, keys, etc.) as prompts for new original stories. We read “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon and wrote about the places that best represent who we are and where we come from. We read Maya Angelou’s “Letter to Her Younger Self” and wrote letters to our own younger selves and we read “Open Letter to Your Future Self” from WanderLust and wrote letters to our futures, as well. We read “Ghost” by Cynthia Huntington and wrote our own ghost stories and we read the short story “Who’s in my bed?” and wrote our own scary stories to celebrate Halloween. We can’t wait to be back again next week to see what new amazing stories our YMCA writers will create!

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. So far this year, we’ve provided 38 seats totaling $11,559.00. For information about our scholarship program or to become a valuable donor providing these seats, please email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.