Research Project Summary
Mighty Writers Camden is one site of several community literary spaces founded by the community organization Mighty Writers. This site, in particular, is located in the Waterfront South neighborhood, and it offers a free daily after-school writing academy for children in third to eighth grades, teen writing workshops, and volunteer opportunities for community members. The attendees of Mighty Writers Camden range from eight to seventeen years old, are predominantly African-American and Latino, and live in the Waterfront South neighborhood.
The primary focus of Mighty Writers has been addressing literacy inequities by teaching children and adolescents to write with clarity. However, during the pandemic, Mighty Writers started a new initiative to alleviate food insecurity in the communities surrounding their literacy centers. Mighty Writers Camden began this initiative by becoming a site for distributing school meals. As the program grew, Mighty Writers Camden partnered with various organizations, including the Philabundance Food Bank, to increase the amount of food distributed and improve the quality. Currently, the food distribution program serves an estimated 800 families each week.
Research Project Goals
The Mighty Writers’s primary initiative of teaching writing to children and their new initiative to alleviate food insecurity has operated mostly separately. In this project, during the afterschool writing program, we plan to combine these two initiatives to explore how children read, write, and make sense of their own wellness, specifically food security/insecurity. This writing project will focus on the middle school students (approximately 25 children aged 10 to 14) who attend Mighty Writers Camden in the fall of 2024 during the Monday to Friday after-school writing program. Participants will also include relevant and connectors actors, including community educators and those who attend the food distribution program.
Research Project Objectives
We will focus on answering the following research questions: 1. How do adolescents, who attend Mighty Writers Camden’s afterschool writing program, use critical literacy practices to make sense of community wellness? 2. How has Mighty Writers Camden created a safe space that contributes to the wellness of the Camden community? Both questions will be answered through ethnographic methods of participant interviews and observations.