Author: shandoy

Ask a group of middle school students what music they like to listen to and you might anticipate answers like Megan Thee Stallion, Drake, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles. I asked the young people from LinkSTL’s Summercamp at Clay Community Resource Center (CCRC) what song they’d like to listen to during […]

This #GivingTuesday, St. Louis’ underserved youth need your help.   Education is one of the strongest predictors of future career success, upward mobility, and health. But under-resourced schools, poverty, and toxic stress (like abuse, neglect, and other violence) hinder the ability of the most at-risk students to learn and succeed, […]

YourWords STL has partnered with SLU, St. Louis Public Schools, and Link STL to provide tutoring and creative writing workshops at our new location with Clay Community Resource Center in Hyde Park! We are offering free tutoring from 3:30-5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  The Clay Community Resource Center is a […]

In the past 20 months, all of humanity has had to grow and adapt in order to keep going. In March 2020, YWSTL had to quickly grow from 2.5 hours of tutoring per week to 3 hours of virtual tutoring per day. We’ve since quadrupled our tutoring pool, created a […]

YWSTL is excited to profile the work of Olivia DePaul, one of our most dedicated, patient, and engaging volunteers! Olivia tutors the young people at Marygrove Children’s Home, a residential facility in Florissant, MO, for children who have been placed in foster care or experienced trauma. Our “on-call” tutor, Olivia […]

By Lydia Paar, Summer Creative Writing Workshop Leader
It’s been awhile since I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic epidemic novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, but what I recall about it is distance: correspondence over letters–words which keep two lovers in contact over years of circumstantial separation. I think

Guest blog from YourWords AmeriCorps Vista, Kim Daniel
From elementary school until sophomore year of high school, regardless of applied effort, punishment, or parental lectures, I failed to produce anything more than individual “A” grades, never cumulative “A’s” for the quarter or the semester. Therefore, to my amazement, when my

Guest blog from YourWords STL Development Manager, Dr. Michelle M. Haberberger
Every educator I’ve ever known has heard this old phrase: “Those who can’t do, teach.” Even though most people use it as a lame attempt at humor, I’ve always been insulted by it.
American teachers, as a whole, are

A local Emmy-award winning filmmaker, Daniel Blake Smith, has theatrically staged the real-life stories of the young men who reside at Marygrove Children’s Home, in Florissant, Missouri. By way of a collaboration with YourWords STL, PRIME Theater, and Marygrove Children’s Home, two performances of Unheard Voices: You Don’t Know My […]