ywp blog

 Champlain Mill -- Our New Home : Winooski River floods Mill in 1927. YWP offices are about 8 windows down in the submerged portion. New address: YWP, Champlain Mill, 20 Winooski Falls Way, Suite #4, Winooski, VT, 05404.

Well here I go... A brief history of the Young Writers Project, call it the elevator pitch:

• Thirty-two year career in journalism; had fun, did some good but was getting tired of cut, cut cut.
• Created a weekly feature to publish best work by students and to promote best practices for teaching writing. In three years it had ballooned -- about 850 submissions in 2005/06, and I was doing it all at home -- making pages, doing a Dreamweaver web site and so and so....
• In early January 2006 I decided to kill the project at the end of the school year. A week later... 

• Along came Vermont Business Roundtable -- Lisa Ventriss, Stagie Davis, Marc vanderHeyden and Tim Volk -- who had an idea: They'd pay me a lot of money to watch me jump off a cliff and see if I could make something of this idea. So for two years the Roundtable and most of its members have put their money where their hopes were -- they've supported us mightily.
• Flash forward to January of 2009, or thereabouts. We've received nearly 12,000 submissions -- about 3,500 so far this year -- and about 25,000 additional posts online.
• We've had several hundred college mentors who've given thousands of comments to students.
• We're leaving the protective wing of The Roundtable and have other funders helping out.
• We've just hired Eva DeVries and Lee McIsaac (formally) to help the effort. They are awesome.
• Our main site, youngwritersproject.org has about 3,400 users (about 3,100 students) and loads of actiivty. It's a community that fights and whines and creates and supports. They're amazingly civil; they are learning and growing. How cool.
• We've created an offshoot as a way to get into the schools: ywpvt.net or The Schools Project. We build sites for schools to use in writing curriculum. Vermont is in the late Jurassic Period of the Digital Age; enough said -- for the moment.
• And we are now in the process of moving into the mill you see above. If you count the windows just under water in this 1927 photo, we're about eight down. The space is dry but it was a teen center and it is, to put it mildly, a mess. More on that later.

So here I am 2.5 years into this experiment, and, frankly, on a cusp.


Come back and I will be giving you little bites. Because I believe you would have long since made it to the top of the Empire State Building, were you in the elevator listening to this. gg

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