Drop-in Tutoring
826LA offers free drop-in tutoring Monday through Thursday, from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. We understand the power of personalized instruction, and so we offer local students individualized help with their homework. On weekday afternoons, students pack into our writing lab, where they work with tutors to complete their daily assignments, and often to embark on ambitious writing projects: poems, stories, comic books, and self-initiated research. We regularly publish work written in drop-in, and Dogtown Books, an in-house publishing outfit dedicated to putting this after-school writing into print.

Workshops
826LA offers writing workshops that cover a wide spectrum of subjects, all designed to strengthen students’ skills, foster their creativity, and give them an opportunity to execute projects that showcase their work. Working professionals teach all our workshops, and we keep class sizes small to ensure that students get plenty of individualized attention. Our workshops focus on a variety of topics. Recent classes have covered crafting college-application essays, designing imaginary countries, preparing for the SAT, reviewing runway fashion, and writing nonsense poetry.

Publishing
Our Young Writers Program is dedicated to publishing the writing of high-school students in Los Angeles. Our most recent volume, Entering New Territory: Dreams for a New Los Angeles, was written by the students of Theodore Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Roosevelt alumnus, wrote the introduction to the book. Throughout the writing process, Mayor Villaraigosa visited the students, reading their work and encouraging their progress. Each of the students worked through a multi-draft writing process, receiving editorial guidance from 826LA volunteers. The final result is a stunning collection of dreams for and about Los Angeles, a genre-spanning assortment of prose and verse, fables and ghost-stories, accounts of violence and personal triumph. Editorial decisions about YWP books are made by a student board, whose members work closely with literary professionals to learn skills like layout and book design. By providing students guidance without interference, we ensure that students’ writing is respected and that their ideas are valued. Rhythm of the Chain, by students of Animo Inglewood Charter High School with a preface by Phil Jackson, was the first of 826LA’s publications, bringing together pieces with common focus: teamwork. Click here to read excepts from Entering New Territory featured in the LA Times.

In-School Support for Teachers
Since it is sometimes difficult for classes to come to us, 826LA sends volunteers into school throughout Los Angeles. Our tutors support Los Angeles teachers in their classrooms, providing students with one-on-one attention and feedback as they work on various writing assignments: sonnets, biographies, University of California application essays, and more. In Community Photoworks, a recent collaboration between 826LA and the Getty Museum, seventh-graders learned the basics of photographic composition, went into Los Angeles with cameras, and wrote and polished artist statements. Their photographs and statements were displayed in a gallery exhibition in Venice.

Field Trips
In the mornings, classes from around Los Angeles visit our writing lab to participate in our engaging and spirited field trips. Teachers can choose from one of our field-trip plans—like workshops in screenwriting and journalism—or they can request a custom-designed program. 826LA will tailor a field trip to complement any teacher’s curriculum. For example, middle-school students studying the relationship between art and survival came to 826LA for a workshop to write desert-island screenplays. They created original characters and then explored the ways those characters acted and interacted when stranded together. Our most popular field trip is Storytelling & Bookmaking, in which classes collaborate to write stories for Mr. Barnacle, the never-seen, always-cranky publisher behind Barnacle & Barnacle Books. With the help of a storyteller, illustrator, and typist, a class works together to create characters, a setting, and a plot for an original story. (A recent book chronicled the friendship between an injured mouse and a sandwich-making robot policeman.) The action builds to a thrilling cliffhanger, and then each student has an opportunity to write an ending, create an illustration, bind his or her book, and walk away with their finished product. Barnacle is notoriously hard to please, but our students’ work manages to earn his enthusiastic approval every time.