The 826 pieces I was missing
Creator: Aanchal Dharmani
The community partner organization that I worked with was 826 Boston, a non-profit youth writing organization that empowers traditionally underprivileged students. They essentially help students aged 6-18 to find their voices and enhance communication skills that are integral to succeed in life and academics. My artifact is a personal blog post that I wrote based solely off of my four-month experience working alongside this organization, volunteering with their K-12 students and tutoring them on a weekly basis. Additionally, I also build a link to my personal mission and beliefs and how that led to a very different outlook on service. Here, I evaluate my passion for writing and walk the reader to my personal experience and connect it to how this led to my endeavors and efforts taken to help these children express their ideas.
It is a sheer medium of catharsis for me, where my mind and fingers automatically translate my emotions into words. It is the only thing that comforts me, the only place where anger and pain find a constructive outlet. Writing is my forte. It is an unyielding powerful current that helps me deal with the inevitability of life. It is like breathing, where the words are like oxygen, revitalizing the decaying mind. The distress of being shackled by the ineluctability of life comes out in the words I spin together. Feelings of angst unintentionally open the doors to creative writing. The thoughts within, pour out with no barriers; where ideas become my means of expression.
My passion for writing has not just earn me a vital role in high school and college, but it also contributed significantly into my service learning at 826 Boston, a non profit organisation that promotes youth writing, publishing and empowers traditionally underprivileged and underserved students aged 6-18 in order to aid them in building communication skills and find their voices. Being a proficient writer plays an integral role in one’s daily life and 826 Boston provides students with the one on one attention they require in order to enhance writing skills that are fundamental to their future endeavours. Furthermore, their unique programs help express their ingenuity, individuality, and innovation, which are some of the core characteristics that everyone must learn to denote.
During the initial weeks of Community Learning 2, when we were amidst the process of selecting an organisation, I noticed that 826 Boston’s visions and missions aligned perfectly with those of mine. I also understood that they were multifaceted and holistic, which is another factor that paved me towards making my choice of volunteering with them. Community Learning 2 was purposeful in terms of the course objectives and in terms of the service learning aspect, but it provided me with the abundance of opportunities that helped me reiterate not only to the community, but also my values, intellectual agility, social consciousness and commitment.
Furthermore, I felt compelled to help students express themselves in writing simply because I want to prove that expressive writing really does enable people to get over diffidence, negative emotions and redirects them towards positive relationships or even merely having a relatively more positive perspective. This, although a personal aim, was only enhanced when we learned about the AfterSchool in Week 6. AfterSchool is an organisation that has a vast history of turning the aimless hours after school into productive learning time. This is a big benefit for kids with attention issues. Especially keeping underprivileged children as the target audience, AfterSchool offers classes in areas, where they don’t provide tests, thus allowing students to work together in groups. It is a stress-free, fun and meaningful way to garner kids’ interests and help put them on a road to channelise their energy in a more productive path.
Similarly, 826 Boston takes the opportunity to hold creative writing workshops in the community where they have an enriching experience of exploring ideas together. This allows us to gauge into the abundance of untapped talent that is hidden within the children and once you sit with them one on one and support their visions and break the barriers of structure, words flow in wondrous beauty. I have personally spent idyllic hours discussing themes of mythology, science fiction and even space with the children and they converse with sincerity to create a legitimate story. Experiencing the joy of exploring the unlimited possibilities of imagination, we as volunteers helped in the process of the children overcoming their inhibitions and aided in making them completely transparent with their thoughts and expression. Pooling in their ideas and skills with our ability to edit and structure, we combined elements to create an incredible end result. Not only did the students produce prodigious fiction, but they also became more liberated in terms of social and emotional aspects.
All in all, expression and outlet in writing short stories helped bring positivity to their lives, which was deeply satisfying for me because it was an intrinsic objective for me and it was more of a self directed activity. Engaging with these children and being able to share my love for writing made me share my personal success in overcoming blocks and hurdles to growth due the inability to express feelings. As I mentioned earlier, writing is cathartic and I aim to help each person unleash the enormous power within to experience a beautiful feeling of freedom. 826 Boston’s creative workshops are designed to spread the message: Expression matters, not the language, feelings matter, not the structure and lastly, communication matters, not the readers.