This is a network of young people from around the world who want to write for and with others to create change – whether personally, locally, or globally. Writers in the Write4Change (W4C) community integrate art, technology, and the affordances of social media in a supportive, safe space, expanding the boundaries of what ‘counts’ as writing to intermingle visual, audio, linguistic, and other forms of composing across languages and modalities.
Write4Change is an online community for youth to share, engage, and learn about issues they care about through writing, art, and all forms of creative expression. Begun in a collaboration between educators, researchers, and young people from around the world who wanted a curated, moderated place to write and imagine together with others with similar goals, Write4Change (W4C) is a place to share, and voice ideas on how to make change. From interactive discussions, organizing and supporting movements around social issues, to conversations about personal change or however you may define change for you and/or your community, W4C offers a platform to get your opinions out into the world with a group of committed youth!
We use social media platforms for our writing so that our online community is easily accessible across multiple geographic locations and is on a familiar platform that also offers the ease of sharing and creating multimedia projects.
W4C on Facebook.We use Facebook (Private) Groups as a platform for our writers to connect with each other and with an audience of readers around the world. We urge community members to be both readers and writers engaged in a dialogue about writing offering feedback and encouragement to each other. Our moderators – both youth and adult – have thoughtfully created resources and writing prompts that can be used by members to engage with W4C and to continue to build a writing community. Though there is no compulsion to participate in the units, it does offer youth writers an entry point into the conversation and opportunities for collaboration.
W4C on Instagram. While W4C on Facebook is a private group, the Instagram handle is the public facing platform for us to facilitate discussion and reach out to others. W4C on Instagram shares stories, surveys and images to both keep the community engaged and reach out to wider audiences interested in writing, storytelling and inspiring change.
W4C Blog. The blog is a collection of reviews, writing and content gathered from members, moderators and guests. Here community members can share their work with broader audiences. We invite writers to share their creations to the blog and also value hearing their experiences collaborating with our large, global writing community.
There are multiple ways of engaging with our community of youth writers. You can choose to be a moderator, a mentor, a member, or an educator on the W4C platform. These roles are not mutually exclusive – you can choose how involved you want to be and work across roles! We also meet once a month in-person (online) to workshop our multimedia writing projects. Please check our Get Involved page to know more
To us, writing can look many different ways, in many different languages. This can include traditional textual forms (essays, narratives, poems) and more arts and media oriented textual forms (digital stories, movies, films, animation, podcast, vlogs, image, music, etc.). Writing is a form of composing, as people use and intermix modes like written text, video, audio, and image (e.g., writing a report, creating a documentary, making a digital story, composing a poem, setting poetry to music, podcasting, interviewing, etc.) to create something new and impactful. The Write4Change team moderates and monitors activity on the multiple platforms that we use, to ensure a safe and supportive community for our members.
We leave it to individuals to decide what constitutes ‘change’ or ‘social action’ in their contexts- from supporting causes, to organizing movements around social issues to conversations about personal change – or however W4C members may define change for themselves and/or their community
Join our supportive community of youth writers and change makers!
Our Facebook group (private) and Instagram handle are moderated by youth collaborators and educators, and the content is created with youth collaborators. Write4Change team will be moderating and monitoring activity on the platform to ensure that the community is free of bullying and inappropriate posts.
