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Project Music is the teen volunteer group of Keys 2 Success, where volunteers can expand their worldview and learn to use their own privilege to better their communities. In this blog, we will share writings by our volunteers to give some insight into their experience.
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Written by Thea Yoon
Volunteer, Smith College Sophomore
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“They can write about anything.” This, I was told, was the rubric for the Keys 2 Success story-writing workshop. In other words, we were putting no set limits on the kids’ creativity. In the beginning, this presented to me, as a volunteer, both freedom and an exciting challenge: to inspire these young storytellers to keep churning out new ideas over four weeks in an online setting.
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For the majority of the time spent in writing sessions, myself and my budding-writers were tasked with building a world out of a monochrome google doc and a blinking cursor. In the beginning, the thought of writing stories virtually for four weeks intimidated me. I was afraid of the looming Zoom-fatigue, and I was also aware that watching someone type words onto a screen could be much less enticing than the pressable piano-keys sitting right next to the monitor.
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With that in mind, for the first week and a half, I started off sessions with short lessons about story-telling—the importance of developing themes, setting, characters, etc. I used methods I learned from my years in an 3rd-5th grade English class like brainstorming under bolded headings and filling out story mountains. I made slides, pasted pictures in between blotches of text, and shared short-stories to try and keep the students’ attention. But still, I feared the burnout of the imagination engine that oiled their creative pieces.
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It was because of this concern that I asked one of my younger students midway through the camp, “Do you want to take a break from writing tomorrow? We can watch a video or play a game for a change of pace.”
To my surprise, I was met with an emphatic, “No. I want to write another story!”
I asked another one of my students a similar question.
“No. This is only the end of part I!”
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I was amazed and relieved. I wondered how I could even think about burning out when we had infinite stories to tell. I realized I had to relax a bit and let the students guide me. It didn’t matter if we weren’t finishing a story a day, or if we hit a case of “writer’s block” once in a while. What mattered was that they knew they had a space to be creative, a place to be uncertain, and a place to hear their own voices.
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Besides the mini-concerts in the main room, my favorite part about volunteering with Keys was getting to know my students as people and seeing those personalities come out on paper within their stories. By simply asking what they ate for dinner the night before their session, I was able to have conversations with each of them. I found out I shared a birthday with one student, I read the same manga as another. Through these little exchanges, it became easier for them to share with me what they wanted to write. Whether it was through a story about ultra-rare potato chips, a missing doll, or four friends getting lost in the woods, each piece was unique to the student.
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By the end of the camp, I understood what the Keys summer program was all about: giving promising and passionate young students a chance to explore their voices without boundaries. And by volunteering, I was returned with being just as inspired as I hoped my students would be.
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