19/20 Annual Report
Dear 826 MSP community,
We started the 2019–20 program year with much to celebrate. Our organization turned ten years old, and we became an official chapter of the largest network of youth writing centers in the country, 826 National. We joined forces with our sister chapters in eight other cities to strengthen our work of amplifying youth voices and redistributing power through literacy. The fall semester was full of high enrollment in programs, partnering with community organizations and local authors to deliver programming, and continuing to settle into our youth writing center in South Minneapolis and our Writers’ Room at South High (both in their second year).
Then, spring 2020 brought with it a pandemic that significantly altered every facet of our lives. As the pandemic closed our youth writing spaces, we reimagined our programs to ensure that the young writers of the Twin Cities had the educational support and writing platform they needed. We offered academic support to all students and families via Zoom, safely delivered books, supplies, and technology to students’ homes, and made writing instructional videos that could be watched by not only our students, but the greater Twin Cities community of young authors.
And then in May 2020, a member of our community, George Floyd, was killed in our South Minneapolis neighborhood. Our city moved into an uprising, and our students transitioned from a spring facing screens to a summer facing unrelenting injustice.
We invite you to read through this report and sit with our heartbreaks and triumphs of the last year. As you will see from these pages, and most importantly from the students’ words themselves, being a young author in the Twin Cities at this moment is full of resistance, resilience, and hope.
- Samantha Sencer-Mura, Executive Director
