An Open Invitation to the Writer-Changemaker in You
My mission to erase the red ink
I vividly remember being in eighth grade when my English teacher, Mr. Grime, returned my essay on Romeo and Juliet and circled every single grammatical error I made in thick, red ink. He labeled ‘T’ for incorrect tense, ‘SP’ for spelling mistakes, ‘SV’ for subject-verb agreement errors. These were just a handful that I could remember. Scared and fearful of the red ink, I despised English as a subject and avoided (to the best of my ability) reading and writing essays entirely. Little did I know that this fear would carry through to my twenties, inhibiting my creativity, my opinions, and perhaps most importantly, my voice.
Moving the Needles (MtN), initially, was a way for me to support my friend. Toffy began MtN as a personal pursuit, to explore the intersection between journalism, writing, and social impact. I believe that was a wonderful idea and helped create a logo and set up the Medium page. As Toffy invited friends to write for the publication, myself included, we realized how people loved the goal of the publication yet struggled to commit to writing. Some said they didn’t know how to write, some said they didn’t have enough time, some said they didn’t have any particular ideas or topics to work on. We brainstormed ways to support our friends and landed on hosting an intimate and informal four-week writing workshop. It was a fun and eye-opening experience. I learned a lot from being both a participant and (at times) a co-facilitator.
Since we are about to begin hosting our second iteration of the workshop, Toffy and I decided this was something we wanted to move forward with together, and took time to sit down and revisit the ‘why’ of MtN. We walked through an exercise to hash this out, developing a logic model and listing the resources, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact of MtN.
On sheets of scrap paper, we started writing and brainstorming the ultimate impact that we each wanted to see. We asked each other tough questions: Why are we doing this? What do we hope to achieve? Then, bouncing off each other’s ideas, we landed on an impact statement: To empower our community to create change and do good. And from that, we began working backward. We listed the outcomes needed to achieve the impact, the outputs required to produce the outcomes, and the activities necessary to achieve those outputs.
We truly believe that everyone is a thinker, a writer, a changemaker in some way, shape, or form. For some people, including myself, we have lost touch with those sides of ourselves. For some people, including myself, we intentionally, but unconsciously, cage and lock them inside. However, we believe that everyone can make change in their own different ways and we want to empower our community to create change and do good by helping:
- People feel confident in their voices
- People feel inspired
- People feel connected and part of a community
MtN started as Toffy’s personal journey, which then grew into a Medium publication, a series of writing workshops, and a safe and collaborative space for everyone to write. This humbling evolution could not have happened without our writers’ wish to expand themselves, their open-mindedness and curiosity, and their hope for change. As we continue to grow our community, through our publication, hosting workshops, and holding safe writing spaces, we would like to invite the writer and changemaker in you to be part of MtN. With each other’s support, we hope to foster a place where we can make grammatical errors and still write, and have half-baked, bubbling ideas and still create. I hope that within this environment, we can erase the red ink and use our voices, through writing, to create the change we want to see.
Fair (Prima) is currently working as a healthcare consultant, and she is committed to improving the health of communities through food, technology, and compassion. She loves trying out new recipes (especially Bon Appetit’s) and can be easily bribed with buttery popcorn.
