Our Vision
Our Aim:
To build self-respect, community and independent voices for young people through the sharing of stories.
Our Key Principles:
· Every young person has a story to tell and the capacity to tell it.
· Collaboration and a deep connection with the stories of others is often the most powerful way to learn.
· Young people should be able to tell their stories in the way that they want them to be told.
Our Work
We run 10 week long programmes at Future Youth Zone to build self-esteem and community among young people. These projects come in four main stages.
Engage – We work with schools to identify students lacking in confidence or needing a creative outlet and get them signed up.
Enlighten – Our programme introduces students to storytelling techniques and to the writing of young people to build their confidence in self-expression and enable them to learn from each other’s experiences.
Empower – The storytellers themselves decide how they want their stories to be told, becoming editors, project planners and event organisers as well as writers.
Inspire – Young participants publish their stories and present their work at a graduation ceremony that celebrates the writing and voices of young people.
Our Impact
As a charity our primary goals are to build self-esteem among disadvantaged young people, to foster community among diverse participants and to help them develop techniques for telling their stories with confidence.
We have seen this realised through our programmes and through the feedback we’ve received from young people, parents and schools. We have professionally printed the work of every enrolled young person. At our ‘book launch’ events we’ve had further evidence of the increase of confidence that comes from young people having their work publicly celebrated. We also use the Rosenberg survey to measure changes in self-esteem and, through it, have seen a marked increase in the self-belief and resilience of young people on our programmes. To find out more about our record, read our last annual impact report.
Our Team
This project began with an accident in a Year 9 History classroom in 2015. 5 years later, many of those young people whose work was published and displayed in local museums and galleries are now volunteers, and have helped to plan and deliver our sessions for the next generation of storytellers.
They are also joined by their original teacher, Sam Norwood, who has been teaching in Barking and Dagenham for the last 7 years. He is also the first UK-based Freedom Writer teacher, one of several hundred educators across the world who promote a culture of acceptance and diversity in classrooms from Rwanda to Palestine.
We are fortunate also to work with amazing educators from our local community to make sure every young storyteller has access to the guidance and support to tell their story.
If you’d like to get involved, then click here.
Our Base
We are incredibly fortunate to have found a home in the amazing Future Youth Zone - a pioneering centre that offers an outstanding provision of facilities, services and opportunities to young people in Dagenham. All of our storytellers become members of this exceptional organisation and get access to hundreds of opportunities outside of the Write Back project. Find out more about their work and how to become a member here.
Our Supporters
We are delighted to have been awarded a leadership grant by the prestigious Shackleton Foundation and join their network of inspirational organisations. This grant is absolutely crucial in our mission to help as many young people as possible tell their stories.
More information about their work and the other projects they fund can be found here.
In 2019, we were generously supported UnLtd and were honoured to have been awarded one of their grants.
More about their great work can be found here.
We have also been fortunate enough to have been supported at different stages by a number of organisations.
The team meeting Erin Gruwell from the Freedom Writer Foundation.