There are a lot of good people out there doing great things for public education. Author Dave Eggers is one such person. He asks people to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. In this video, Eggers talks, with spellbinding eagerness, about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs.
And at the 2008 TED conference in February, he made a wish:
I wish that you—you personally and every creative individual and organization you know—will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area, and that you’ll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of innovative public-private partnerships.
But you don’t need to go that far, he reminds us — it’s as simple as asking a teacher “How can I help?” And when you have figured out how to help, he asks that you share your own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School.
Dave Eggers’ first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Since then he’s written two more novels and launched an independent publishing house, which publishes books, a quarterly literary journal (McSweeney’s), a DVD-based review of short films (Wholpin), a monthly magazine (The Believer) and the Voice of Witness project.
Meanwhile, Eggers has established himself as a philanthropist and teacher-at-large. In 1998 he launched 826 Valencia, a San Francisco-based writing and tutoring lab for young people, which has since opened six more chapters across the United States. He has extended his advocacy of students by supporting their educators, instituting a monthly grant for exceptional Bay Area teachers.
Time magazine had this to say about Eggers: “Many writers, having written a first best-seller, might see it as a nice way to start a career. He started a movement instead.”
