UPTOWN STORIES INC
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : k**e@u***********s.o*g
Mission Statement
Uptown Stories inspires kids to discover and develop their inner voices in a diverse community of writers.
About This Cause
At Uptown Stories, we believe that writing is an essential tool for self-expression, critical thinking, and academic success. Based in upper Manhattan, we offer small-group writing workshops for children ages eight to fifteen, led by master teachers and professional authors. To ensure our workshops are accessible to all children, tuition is pay-what-you-can. Uptown Stories creates an exciting, challenging, and supportive community in which young authors thrive. For many kids in school, unfortunately, writing is like a puzzle or a punishment, a pre-ordained five-paragraph format with a set number of sentences, transition words, and pieces of evidence. Every piece of writing is graded, often based on a rubric which allows no choice and no personality. We founded Uptown Stories to see what kind of writing kids could do if they were encouraged to tell their own stories, for themselves. One small writing workshop grew to two, then four, and this winter we’re offering eleven in-school and after-school workshops including “Jump Up and Write,” “The Elements of Fiction,” “Creating Otherworlds,” “The Game of Poetry,” “POW! Writing and Drawing Comics,” and “The Power of Words: Political Writing.” We hire rockstar teachers, writers, and artists who ensure our workshops are inspiring, challenging, and fun. Every workshop culminates in a print anthology of student work, which is also available on Amazon, and a reading in front of friends and family at the WordUp bookstore. Most importantly, to ensure our workshops are accessible to all families, our tuition is pay-what-you-can. In a neighborhood where 37% of children live below the poverty line, and over 60% are foreign born, this tuition policy promotes a genuinely diverse, inclusive environment. In 2017, over 80% of our students paid reduced tuition. Our future leaders are young right now. Even if writing is not their primary calling they must be equipped to understand and express themselves, to trust in their own imagination. Many of our students start our workshops asking, “Is it OK if I write this? Am I allowed to write this?” And our goal is to help them understand that while their audience may not agree, they have the autonomy, the ability, and yes, the constitutional right to express themselves. Writing can offer a space where they can discover who they are, and what they have to say. As one student explained, “Writing is an outlet for a lot of feelings I don't really have anywhere to express otherwise. It feels like a private space for me that I only I can really understand.” With a staff of only two employees, and an annual budget of less than $150,000, we make a lot out of a little every day. But we won’t be able to continue our pay-what-you-can tuition policy without outside financial support. Here is how you can help: Sponsor a student for $600 -- provide full tuition for a writer in-need. Sponsor the anthology for $2000 - underwrites the editing, design, layout, and printing of our bi-annual anthology. Sponsor a laptop cart for $3000 -- provide ten Chromebooks for use in our workshops (an important tool many of our students lack at home). Sponsor a workshop for $6000 -- sponsor the full cost of one of our workshops for ten writers in-need. Uptown Stories has done so much with so little, but we need more support in order to continue. With your donation, you will help students realize that writing is not an “assignment,” it is a tool, and a refuge, a story, even a piece of them.