A Year of Online Writing
It’s been a whole year since we moved our writing clubs online.
When Covid hit, we had to shut our doors and say goodbye to our young people but we were determined to keep supporting our community.
After a month of hard work and ingenuity, we brought all our Writing Labs online. From sofas, kitchen tables and desks across Hackney our young writers logged-in and took up the mantle to continue writing a better future while on lockdown at home.
Can you help our young writers?
Despite all kinds of challenges and obstacles, our young writers battled on, turning up every week to unleash their imaginations. Thanks to their resilience and creativity we were able to produce an outstanding anthology of poems, a brand new audio soap with the BBC and an exciting installation project Unexpected Poetry, launching this weekend.
Thank you to everyone who has supported across this very different year. Here’s to many more hours of writing.
A year in numbers
- 122 hours of online workshops. That’s just over five days.
- Nine laptops sent to our families, to help our writers get online
- 98 “big loud Ministry of Stories hellos”
- 47 rubber chickens*
- Three major writing projects
Through our Story Engine writing website…
- Five east London school partners were given access to The Story Engine as a creative writing esource for their students
- 225 young writers were issued logins
- 194 original stories were submitted
- 168 pieces of feedback were asked for and given by Mentors
- 57 finished stories were published to the platform
* Do the Rubber Chicken
- You shake a wrist and count 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
- Now the other wrist, count to 8
- Shake your arm and count to 8
- Then the other arm and count to 8
- Now your legs, keep counting to 8
- Add in your feet, one at a time 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
- Repeat from the top, shake each limb for 7 then 6,5,4,3,2,1
- Now shake your whole body and shout RUBBER CHICKEN!
