We are immensely excited to announce that Lifting Voices has been chosen as a featured organization on the ChangeMakers home page! ChangeMakers is a division of Ashoka, and if you aren’t familiar with Ashoka then you’re in for a treat. Ashoka nurtures and supports game-changing agents of social change, and is an enormous force for good worldwide. Lifting Voices had the honor of being chosen for Ashoka’s ChangeMaker Award in Spring 2009. Being one of a handful of groups selected for the home page is a real blast! Our great thanks to John Healey Photography for capturing the image of our workshops featured by Ashoka’s ChangeMakers.

Welcome to the Lifting Voices Blog–where we talk a lot about words and show you the many ways you can use them to create social justice and ignite your imagination. We will present you with stories from our workshops, alert you to important events, share the latest dialogue on our advocacy site, and connect you with our work.

We really hope to hear from you, too. Maybe you’ll comment on a story posted here. Maybe you’ll decide to volunteer with us. Maybe one of our Connecting Voices topics will inspire you so much that you will have to write until your hands hurt. Whatever it is, we look forward to hearing from you and connecting with you through our new Lifting Voices site.

This new name, new site, and new term have us feeling pretty excited. We hope you are excited, too and look forward to touching base again soon.

Welcome. And feel free to take a look around.

How quickly the summer flew by! We’re engaging in 13 weekly writing workshops this Fall. We’ll be working with youth in under-served neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. including Shaw, Congress Heights, Columbia Heights, and Bloomingdale. We’re also very pleased to welcome a new team of volunteer Workshop Facilitators to the table. Emily, Pat, Laura, Lacey, Maria, and Moriah will connect with our young authors. These volunteers have taken time out of their very busy schedules to support children in need. They’ll be forming meaningful connections and establishing real relationships. A big hooray for our passionate citizens!

Oh, oh, oh my. We are unbearably excited about our new advocacy program. BridgingVoices.org will be a site for exchange between people living on the fault lines of fractured communities and the decision makers who craft policies to address them. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and only site of its kind. To learn more, please visit our stories for advocates page.

Words Alive was a lively success! We stacked and packed our room at the bustling community hot spot Busboys and Poets, sending an overflow crowd up on stools, out the door, and into the hall. The walls resounded with the joyful noise of young people finding their voices. Many, many thanks to all our beautiful friends, old and new, who turned out to support under-served youth and make Words Alive work. For photos of the event, please click here.