It’s 3 p.m. at Mighty Writers and everyone is in motion. Two eighth grade boys are hunched over a computer, fighting over which Pandora station to play. As they debate T.I.’s awesomeness relative to Lil Wayne’s, a younger boy scrawls spelling words on index cards with a red magic marker. There are two long tables in the main room, and each is packed with tutors and students. A picture of Barack Obama on the cover of The Chicago Sun-Times, enlarged and framed, hangs on one wall. Next to it is a Marvel cover depicting a group of fist-pumping superheroes. A set of brightly colored, comic-book style interjections decorates the back wall: “oof!” “bam!” “splat!” and “kapow!”
Alongside the two main tables is a large bookshelf; each book is marked with a color-coded sticker according to genre. Across the room from the library, dozens of board games are stacked sloppily on a smaller shelf. Squirming students surround each of the room’s three computers. Even the small office off of the main room is full of kids asking questions or showing off work that they’ve completed. There is only one other room, at the back, where a few students and tutors work together in relative quiet.
Lillian Dunn, a Mighty Writers intern and classroom assistant at Independence Charter School, sits at one of the tables in the big room and eyes a young girl’s homework assignment.
“Ok, check it out. So look at your ‘I’m.’ There’s one thing wrong with it. Everything else is perfect, but there’s one thing wrong.” The girl studies her work for a second before adding an apostrophe between the two letters. She looks up at Lillian for approval.
This is the beginning of the three-hour period known as the “after school program” at Mighty Writers. Every Monday through Thursday during the school year, students come from about 10 different Philadelphia schools to receive one-on-one homework help from volunteer tutors. Most of the kids are from the surrounding neighborhood of South Philadelphia, but anyone between ages seven and 18 can attend. One glance around the room says a lot about the many demographics that Mighty Writers affects on a daily basis: there are students in school uniforms, burkas, jerseys and overalls.
The door is kept locked, and a sign on the front reads “Please Knock Mightily.” Rachel Loeper, co-founder and program director, sits at a small table at the front of the room and jumps up to open the door for each student. At 28 years old, Rachel could easily be confused for a college-aged tutor. The kids call her “Miss Rachel,” and she is constantly surrounded by them. She’s not strict, but her older-sister tone commands their respect and triggers in them a desire for her approval.
The second a student enters the building, Rachel sets him or her up with a tutor. A lot of kids have regular tutors who they work with each day, but Rachel is now an expert at rearranging things according to who is sick or running late.
Even amidst the chaos of after school hours, Rachel manages to stay calm. This may be a matter of necessity, as she puts in around 60 hours per week ensuring that everything at Mighty Writers runs smoothly. Besides the after school program, volunteer teachers from all over the city — from college students to published authors — come in each week to teach writing classes on a theme of his or her choosing. Workshops are offered to students as young as five, and Rachel estimates that kids from 50 Philadelphia schools have attended them. Students can sign up for any workshop they like, so long as it is being offered to their age group. These classes typically last around six weeks, and culminate in a final project.
Over the last year, Mighty Writers students have participated in a huge variety of workshops, including Comic Book Writing, Movie Review Writing and the Garden Writing Club.
Not only is Rachel present for every workshop and after school session, she works all day while the kids are in school. In addition to fundraising and meeting with prospective volunteers, Rachel spends time coordinating all kinds of extra events. This week she is focusing on the release of the second issue of the Mighty Writers newspaper, The Mighty Times. Rachel organized a launch party and had copies of the paper printed to circulate around the neighborhood.
Rachel has also been working with a professional actor who volunteered to help students in the “Scary Stories” workshop. The actor will teach the kids how to read aloud in an engaging way in order to prepare them for a live radio reading of their writing on LIVE at the Kelly Writers House.
Considering the amount of work it took to start up Mighty Writers, Rachel’s jam-packed schedule seems, in some ways, like a reprieve. In 2008, Rachel was growing restless at her nine-to-five job at a technology firm in Bucks County. She was working on developing a computer program aimed at strengthening students’ writing skills, but the impersonal aspect didn’t sit right. “I think that people ultimately teach people to write better than computers can.”
Inspired by Dave Eggers’ nonprofit 826 National, which has set up writing centers for kids in eight U.S. cities, Rachel started thinking about how to create a similar space for Philadelphia students. In November of 2008, she took a job as director of a remedial literacy program at Universal Institute Charter School in South Philadelphia. With the support of the Universal faculty, Rachel began gauging Philadelphia’s interest in her vision.
What started out as morning coffee meetings with interested volunteers and happy hours with potential investors quickly gained momentum. It was at one such happy hour that Rachel met a friend of Tim Whittaker, former editor of Philadelphia Weekly, and found out that Tim had also quit his job in order to focus on starting up a similar program. Rachel got in touch with Tim, and the two began working together. Tim had already acquired grant money to put toward startup fees for his program and, through the Philadelphia-based non-profit Universal Companies, he and Rachel were able to obtain a space in South Philly rent-free for one year. Mighty Writers opened in July of 2009, and Rachel began working there full-time.
When she describes the steps she took to start Mighty Writers, Rachel acknowledges the “synchronicity” with which it all came together. The fact that everything fell into place so easily can be attributed in part to the incredible need for organizations like this one in the Philadelphia area. A Pennsylvania native, Rachel always knew she wanted to settle down in Philadelphia. She cites the fact that Philadelphia is a “neighborhood-based” city as a major factor in the program’s success: “I really liked the idea of creating a neighborhood space that would be welcoming to the children and the community.”
The citywide literacy crisis is one issue that has permeated nearly every Philadelphia neighborhood. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, an estimated 22 percent of Philadelphia adults, ages 16 and older, are lacking basic literacy skills. This amount far exceeds the national average of 14.5 percent.
Though Philadelphia has been attempting to tackle this problem for years, the school district has been heavily criticized for its behind-closed-doors approach to decision-making and its support for privatization. This kind of top-down, exclusive policy-making has contributed to a lack of support for major reform in Philadelphia schools.
“In a city where there’s a public education crisis, a lot of these kids fall through the cracks,” says Mighty Writers volunteer and 2009 Penn graduate Eric Karlan, adding that, at Mighty Writers, “[the students] are commended and rejuvenated, and any interest they have in writing is reinforced.”
Dessler, a seventh grader who regularly attends the after school hours, is one example of a student with a renewed interest in writing. Since he took a blog workshop at Mighty Writers, Dessler has been maintaining a football and baseball blog which he updates every other day.
Haniah, a fourth grader at Universal Institute Charter School, has found similar enjoyment in writing since she started coming to Mighty Writers.
“I never liked writing. Ever.” Haniah speaks loudly to the table in front of her, focused on dividing a pack of candy into two even piles for herself and a friend.
“I used to write just to get past it, but now I like it.” She adds that doing her homework with Mighty Writers tutors is “not the same as going home and doing [it] with your parents. I don’t know what it is about the tutors that makes you understand it, that makes it fun.”
Lillian is one of the tutors Haniah is so fond of. At a table in the small back room, Lillian sits with Haniah and cuts pictures out of magazines for a writing prompt collage; she has been helping out at Mighty Writers since opening day and says that her favorite part is writing with the students. “I’ve learned a gigantic amount about being with people,” she says, adding that she has loved “getting to be [at Mighty Writers] long enough to build relationships.”
Lillian also recognizes all of the ways that Mighty Writers benefits its students, pointing out that the organization provides “consistency and a stable place” for Philadelphia youth. “We work with kids whose parents have been in jail, kids with social and developmental issues who are dealing with all the mess that childhood is.” She adds that when students arrive at Mighty Writers after school, “there’s a whole room of adults wanting to know where [they’ve] been and what [they’ve] been doing.”
It is for reasons like this that Rachel continues to work so hard to make Mighty Writers as valuable as possible for Philadelphia students. Though they’re currently struggling to find funding for a second year, Rachel and Tim have high hopes for the future. They’ve already decided that West Philadelphia will be the next neighborhood they expand to, and, Rachel says, “when we dream,” they’ve discussed setting up sites in cities such as Baltimore and New Orleans.
For now, Mighty Writers is succeeding in changing the way Philadelphia students think about their schoolwork. You can hear their happiness from outside on the street and see their academic improvement in the pages of their notebooks. And the best part is, they’re gaining from it. After all, in the words of Haniah, “If you don’t know how to write, you can’t write anything.”
