Story of a Community-Based Writing Resource - And a Call to Engage

Abstract

This article tells the story of YpsiWrites, a community writing resource that provides support, resources, and programs for all writers. It shows how ideas from adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy (2017) provide a generative framework for community-engaged initiatives. It uses this framework to examine the work of YpsiWrites, and, in doing so, illustrates the value of the framework for planning, carrying out, and assessing community-engaged work (CEW). The authors share responses to questions they posed to stakeholders, along with themes from those responses, which paint a more nuanced picture of the nature and potential of this work. They conclude with a call to engage and an invitation for others to use these questions as a heuristic in pursuing their own, unique community-engaged work.