Write Here: Collaborative Community Literacy
Category: Community Engagement Poster
Author(s): Bella Chiango, Alexa Holmes
Presenter(s): Bella Chiango
Mentors(s): Tobi Jacobi
The primary mission of CSU’s Community Literacy Center (CLC) is to create and facilitate literacy opportunities that invite community members—particularly people experiencing confinement or in recovery—to engage in innovative and supportive writing spaces and to value the writing and art that emerges through conversation and circulation. We aim to make space for diverse stories and to listen actively as a way to promote community action and social change. We seek to create opportunities for people to write individually and in collaboration with others as they strengthen their reading, writing and critical thinking skills. In this presentation, we aim to showcase the above values through the work we have done as CLC interns this year. This includes but is not limited to: pop-up story walls around the greater Fort Collins area, writing workshops at Larimer County Community Corrections, publication of the annual SpeakOut! journal, and production of a deck of writing prompts titled “Write Here.” We plan to use these examples to highlight the importance of promoting community literacy, especially within spaces that lack resources, while also creating opportunities for collaboration between different identities and literacy levels. In doing so, not only are we providing and participating in writing spaces, but also creating conversation that sustains these relationships for the future.