826 Seattle Blasts Off
Yesterday featured an open house at http://www.826seattle.org/, where I’ve done some volunteer work. Its mission is to provide after-school tutoring and a forum for kids to develop their writing skills. Since it wasn’t a “running” day for me (I run and hit the gym every second day), I decided I’d walk up to their site on Greenwood.
You had to know that if I was walking, I’d have my camera along. I walked up through Woodland Park (home of the zoo). The picture above wasn’t an impromptu wrestling session between dogs and man - the guy had a pad with him that he purposefully laid down and oriented toward the wan sun, and then let the dogs crawl all over him. It’s not sun-tanning weather here. It was about 40 degrees. (click to enlarge any of the photos).
The storefront site that I was helping paint and sheetrock is now open for business. Part of the site is a quirky retail store with a space theme. They’ve gone to impressive lengths to design themed packaging for a wide array of products and knick-knacks. Note the arcane mathematical formulae on the blackboard. I believe the bulk of their revenue will come from book sales, though. I picked up A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, mostly because Eggers is the father of the 826 movement, and I’d like to see what his head is about. I also bought something called Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers, which features essays on writing by the likes of Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Joan Didion, as I’m always up for examining and marveling at the elusive mysteries of the writing process.
Today’s Seattle Times has an article on 826 and the opening. It appears, both from the article and from my conversations with administrators, that they are way overstaffed with volunteers and are waiting for kids to show up in workable numbers at the tutoring center, so I don’t think I’ll be inflicting myself on vulnerable youth for a while. They say it has taken 6 - 8 months at the other locations for a working ratio of volunteers to kids to develop.
