After-School Tutoring
826LA was founded on the belief that individualized attention to students leads to great academic improvement. Our after-school tutoring program was born from that belief. Weekday afternoons, volunteer tutors wait patiently until eager students charge our writing labs, heads full of questions about writing, math, and even those confounded piano chord progressions. After working with students one-on-one, tutors encourage their students to stretch their imaginations. They first dive into a good book, then work their budding creative skills by tackling a daily writing prompt or revising an already-drafted piece. These works are refined, then collected and published monthly in chapbooks from our in-house publishers, Dogtown Books and Echo Press. The process of writing and publishing with caring volunteer tutors turns even the most tedious of after-school sessions into an imagination factory, making our after-school program a challenging and rewarding atmosphere for future scholars and aspiring authors.

Workshops
826LA’s workshops are an invitation to explore the potential of the written word, all while fostering creativity and strengthening academic skills. Led by our brilliant volunteers, who share their expertise on the subjects at hand, we give students the chance to produce a plethora of products—stories and poems, chapbooks and 'zines, and our student newspapers: The Venice Wave and 826LA Good Times. Other workshop final projects include ingenious robot pencils, comic books that stun even the most brilliant artists, and short films (produced in a mere ninety minutes) that will take Hollywood by storm. Don’t let any students you know pass on these opportunities; we wouldn’t want anyone to miss out on being a star filmmaker for a week, or ruling as the snobbish kings and queens of their own countries.

Keep up to date on workshops that 826LA offers by following our workshop listing and online calendar.

Publishing
Among 826LA's greatest endeavors is the annual Young Authors' Book Project, where we provide students at an LA-area school with an opportunity and a challenge: become a published author by the end of the school year. Over several weeks, students work with a team of 826LA volunteers to write, revise, and re-revise a piece (often through more than 10 drafts) following a pre-determined genre or theme. A select group of those students answers the call to join the editorial board, which works closely with 826LA to determine the book's organization, design, and layout, and to write additional front and back matter. After several months, their essays, poems, and stories are published as a perfect-bound book, with the students as proud authors.

To date, 826LA has published six high school anthologies; our most recent is our largest and most ambitious project to date, Garfield High School’s Sheep Can’t Fly, which features an introduction by Father Greg Boyle, SJ, and is inspired by Joseph Campbell's scholarship.

In-School Support for Teachers
While we at 826LA strive to make our centers and programs accessible to the community, teachers and students are not always able to make it to our writing labs. So, we send our volunteers to them! With a volunteer base that is eager to infiltrate Los Angeles schools, 826LA is prepared to provide the one-on-one writing support that students of all grade levels need in their classrooms. We can work with teachers on whatever writing their students are doing—persuasive and analytical essays, short stories, autobiographies, poems, plays for stage and screen, and those intimidating college-application essays—and we can also enable projects that teachers have dreamed of, but haven't had the support to execute.

If you're interested in bring us to your classroom, please email Julius.

Field Trips
Weekdays throughout the school year, Los Angeles classrooms make their way to our writing labs to embark on 826LA’s field trips, where we create compelling stories in a few short hours. We can design a custom field trip to complement teacher curriculum, and we offer several standard field trips: screenwriting for high school, choose-your-own-adventure stories for middle school, and our most popular field trip: Storytelling & Bookmaking for elementary school. During the latter, students must bring forth their best writing to appease Mr. Barnacle, our never-seen, always-heard (and always-cranky) publisher. They work with volunteers and each other to produce a story with all-new characters, setting, and plot, all the way up to a cliffhanger—at which point students must finish the story on their own, in order to sate Mr. Barnacle's need for originality. They always succeed, and they always leave with a bound, illustrated book to take home.

Recent field trip masterpieces include Nerds of the Jungle and The Evil Luchador vs. You; every field trip is different, and we look forward to working with you to create even more unique stories to boast about. To find out more or to schedule a field trip, please send a note to Danny (at 826LA West) or Bonnie (at 826LA East).