Our Values
Our Vision is a world where the voices of all young people are heard, valued, and celebrated.
Our Mission is is to build confidence, creativity, and social connections among young people by empowering them to share their own stories.
Our Key Principles:
· Every young person has a story to tell and the capacity to tell it.
· Collaboration and a deep connection with the stories of others is often the most powerful way to learn.
· Young people should be able to tell their stories in the way that they want them to be told.
Our Work
We run 10 week long programmes in schools and youth centres to build self-esteem and community among young people. These projects come in four main stages.
Engage – We work with schools to identify students lacking in confidence or needing a creative outlet and get them signed up.
Enlighten – Our programme introduces students to storytelling techniques and to the writing of young people to build their confidence in self-expression and enable them to learn from each other’s experiences.
Empower – The storytellers themselves decide how they want their stories to be told, becoming editors, project planners and event organisers as well as writers.
Inspire – Young participants publish their stories and present their work at a graduation ceremony that celebrates the writing and voices of young people.
Our Impact
We have seen the tremendous power that can come from giving young people the space, opportunity and platform to tell their stories. The lives of the young people we work with can be tough. But when they are listened to, encouraged, and supported to share their own stories, they find something within themselves that is hugely valuable. They find self-esteem and agency – not just in the Write Back room, but for life beyond.
Using the well-respected Rosenberg self-esteem survey, we have found that eight in ten participants' self-esteem improves over the course of our programme, on average by 16%. Our impact is even greater on those who join with particularly low self-esteem. Nine in ten of those young people see improvements, on average by 45%.
To find out more about our record, read our last annual impact report.
Our Team
This project began with an accident in a Year 9 History classroom in 2015. Over five years those young people and their teacher turned an in-school project into a borough-wide charity.
The charity is run by that original teacher, Sam Norwood, who has taught in Barking and Dagenham for over 10 years. He is also the first UK-based Freedom Writer teacher, one of several hundred educators across the world who promote a culture of acceptance and diversity in classrooms.
We are also joined by Nina Eastman Waite who has also over a decade of experience in local schools and leads on our partnerships with schools. And leading on the delivery of our core and graduate programmes in Future Youth Zone is writing tutor and youth work facilitator Ria Mayor.
If you’d like to get involved, then click here.
Our Base
We are incredibly fortunate to have found a home in the amazing Future Youth Zone - a pioneering centre that offers an outstanding provision of facilities, services and opportunities to young people in Dagenham. All storytellers in our youth centre based programmes become members of this exceptional organisation and get access to hundreds of opportunities outside of the Write Back project. Find out more about their work and how to become a member here.
Our Supporters
We are delighted to have been awarded a grant by the prestigious The Mercers’ Charitable Foundation and join a cohort of inspirational organisations focusing on literacy in London. This grant is absolutely crucial in our mission to help as many young people as possible tell their stories.
More information about their work and the other projects they fund can be found here.
We have also been fortunate to have been supported by a number of generous funders including (in alphabetical order): Barking and Dagenham Giving, The Headley Trust, The Heritage Lottery Fund, The Park Charitable Trust, the Shackleton Foundation, the Spectris Foundation and UnLtd.
Storytelling is always a communal act and we are so lucky to be able to work with a range of partners from our neighbours in Barking and Dagenham to national and international organisations.
The team meeting Erin Gruwell from the Freedom Writer Foundation.