Leading The Way: Ian Hadley

It’s about staying nimble, innovating and trying different things. Not sticking to the older version. Not getting entrenched. Not saying “Ink will never work online” because we have to be in the same room with each other …

916 Ink was halfway through their 12 week writing series when the school districts in the Sacramento area began closing. 916 Ink’s workshop sessions build on each other. The teachers hadn’t had time to make a plan for distance learning. So all Ian Hadley and his team could do was let their facilitators know and made sure that their hourly employees were paid …

When did you realize that 916 Ink was going to have to start operating differently?

A lot of our programs are in the classroom working in tandem with the teachers, and they needed time to figure out how to shift to online learning. We made sure our people got paid, and that our students and their families got the word. Despite the shutdown, we continued to work with the kids who were midway through the workshops. We collected submissions from them through their teachers and through direct mail and were able to publish 14 anthologies of our students’ work in the spring. It was important to us to honor the kids we were working with and see that goal through to the end.

Two days after the shutdown, we got an email from one of our parents saying, “I know you can’t host your session next Tuesday, but can you give us something to do? Can you give us some prompts? We’ll get the kids together and enable them to continue down the path.” The kids needed us more than ever, and her note inspired us to move even more quickly. So we launched three workshops – one for elementary school kids, one for middle school kids and one for high school students and reached out to the over 500 kids we had been working with. We had no idea whether the Zoom sessions would work. It was a tumultuous time so we didn’t get a lot of takers but these early online workshops allowed us to get our sea legs and figure out what to do in this virtual environment.

What did you and your team learn from the first series of online writing workshops?

The way we conduct writing workshops translates well to Zoom. The barrier for participation is low – a piece of paper and a pen. The facilitator provides the prompt and then each participant has the opportunity to share what they write, mirroring the way we teach writing in person. My daughter had wanted to participate in an Ink workshop for years. We had paid spots available so she was able to join the Zoom workshops. My daughter came to find me after her first day, and she was literally shaking with excitement. She told me all about the WordSlingers facilitating her class, the kids she’d met, the other student who loves the same things she does. Then she read me what she’d written. And I thought to myself, “This is it. It’s go time. This is something we can do in the midst of all of these challenges. The magic, the alchemy is still there.”

We also launched our community write nights online. Those have been exceptionally popular as well with people calling in from all over the country. We even had two individuals join us from Norway. We’re offering the community write nights every few weeks because we feel like this is a service we could provide. There is so much anxiety and tension in adults, too. Writing and sharing about it is a release for people of every age.

What was the response been to your online workshops and summer camps?

In May, we launched our first opt-in all virtual workshops, and demand was more than double what we had room for. So we established two groups, realizing that some of the challenges of operating a writing workshop had been removed. We don’t have transportation issues. We can offer a second group at the same time because we don’t need another facility.

We did more marketing when we launched our summer camps, and we reached capacity with those as well. We reserved 50% of the slots for kids whose families were able to pay and offered the other 50% for free. We do a place-based scholarship for students who live anywhere within the Sacramento Promise Zone. If a family lives outside the Promise Zone, they can list their family income on the application, and we will consider the child for a scholarship. The majority of our time was spent engaging the communities and families eligible for the free spots. People’s economic status dictates what they have access to. We work hard to level that playing field.

Tell me about Scholars Playground.

Scholars Playground is a one-stop platform for online learning, featuring live tutoring and courses taught by local community educators and partners. Young people can sign up for creative writing, hip hop, painting, spoken word poetry, block coding, bridge engineering and yoga. The amazing part of this effort is that all Scholars receive a computer and wifi access. I’m proud of all that we’ve been able to do to increase access and accessibility.

The true collaborative work, like best practices learning, has only been happening the last month or two. Before that, people were more siloed. I give a ton of credit to Scholars Playground. It’s one of the most interesting opportunities for collaboration I’ve ever had, in the virtual setting or outside of it. Realizing what different nonprofits do well and then capitalizing on it is an interesting approach. Square Root Academy, the folks who power Scholars Playground, can build a website platform. They can code. I don’t know how to code, but we worked on the logo. We worked on the icons. We helped with the marketing because we know a little bit about that. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

What does the fall look like for 916 Ink?

Most of our programming will be in tandem with educators, just as it normally is. We’re looking at two possible in-person offerings – an outdoor classroom on the Maple Campus Elementary School and a workshop at the youth detention facility because their capacity to host Zoom workshops is limited. We’re also planning to offer a series of workshops in the city of Stockton, either later this year or in the spring of 2021. Two of those workshop series will be at the state juvenile justice facility.

It’s become more apparent to us how difficult it is to engage kids. Participatory education is super important. Students’ opinions matter. Students’ voices matter. What they create matters, and there’s not necessarily a right or wrong to what they produce. We’ve been talking about the dangers of the red pen in terms of teaching writing for a long time. We know that by providing a positive space for kids to self-express, they can become re-engaged. It’s the same on Zoom as it is in the classroom.

Have you adjusted your approach because of COVID-19?

Kids are living through trauma. Some are navigating it well; some are navigating it less well but all of them are going through rapid, massive change. They need to be able to process that positively. When the Black Lives Matter protests began, we used prompts related to cultural responsiveness and awareness. With the younger kids, we don’t do a lot of COVID-specific prompts but we do talk about the home a lot. We might ask them to grab their favorite pair of shoes and write a piece called “A Tale Of My Shoes.” We want to meet them where they are. At the same time, we also want to give kids get a break from the current reality so we might say, “I know you haven’t thought about unicorns for nine months, so here’s a prompt about unicorns.”

What has been challenging for you and your team during this pandemic time?

How quickly everything can change. For example, we ran our summer camps in person for exactly a week, during the time the state was re-opening. In preparation, we talked to experts on infectious disease. We created an 8-10 page plan on how to safely return to our office and the Imaginarium (916 Ink’s magical creative writing space). We created block schedules. We taped off desks. We hung shower curtains. We bought hands-free sanitizer dispensers, a UV light to scrub down the copier and sneeze guards to put between the kids. Then, on the second Monday of camp, the governor announced he was shutting the state back down. My team scrambled to put together “adventure boxes” full of fun items for the kids to take home and use as writing prompts and got them out to all the campers that afternoon.

You pivot, and you pivot and then you pivot again. It’s good to innovate, and it’s good to have a team that can pivot but it is exhausting. I feel like we’ve reached a point where the adrenaline rush is over. We have to keep going. The kids need us, but how do we do it? We can’t sustain this pace or stress level so we have to learn how to pace ourselves. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

What has been the biggest surprise so far?

The turnout. The number of kids who have signed up for our programs. Not because I didn’t think that what we do works, but because I felt it was difficult to message. I know how busy families are. To have so many parents opt in and make the extra effort to figure out how to navigate the system in order to participate .. that surprised me.

I don’t know how I could be surprised by this, but staff is just incredible. They have been exhausted and deflated and disillusioned at different stages during the pandemic, and everybody just keeps bringing their A-game.

Discovering our writing workshops work as well as they do online surprised me. Maybe that’s just the pessimist in me. I anticipated a worse case scenario, and we’re not there. We’ve charted and navigated our way through these waters exceptionally well.

What lessons have you learned from the pandemic so far?

I keep going back to innovation and the iterative process. The importance of throwing something out there to see if it works. Not hemming yourself in and trying to be perfect, because if you do, you’ll miss whatever impact you could have had. If we had hunkered down too long, we wouldn’t have had those early experiences in the Zoom world and understood that our method translates. Instead, we just tried it. We opened up the Zoom rooms to see if any kids showed up.

Innovating has become more engrained in 916 Ink’s culture. It allows us to try something, have it fail and have it not be the biggest setback. So we can open in person camps, do them for a week and be grateful those 20 kids got to have those sessions. Then we can figure out how to move camp online because we know how to do that, too. It’s about staying nimble, innovating and trying different things. Not sticking to the older version. Not getting entrenched. Not saying “Ink will never work online” because we have to be in the same room with each other.

In the nonprofit world, there’s tremendous pressure to have everything be perfect from the get go. We write these grants, and it’s the perfect version of our program, and we’d better deliver on every single element of our proposal because the funder’s going to hold us to that. It’s more difficult for nonprofits to innovate, but also more necessary.

When the country reopens and returns to some kind of normal, will 916 Ink return to the classroom?

I can say with 100% certainty that our method works better in person, but there are so many kids that are boxed out from that, by transportation issues or parental availability. Zoom improves access so we will continue to offer online writing workshops in one way, shape or form. They work, and it helps us reach young people that we haven’t been able to reach before and that’s what 916 Ink is all about.

Ian Hadley has been Executive Director of 916 Ink since January 2018. He has spent his entire professional career developing effective programs for underserved children and families. Ian has experienced the power of creative writing and self-expression first hand. Growing up in difficult circumstances while facing a number of early challenges, it was Ian's connection to the written word that ultimately changed the trajectory of his life. He believes strongly that by helping youth experience that same positive connection to literacy, 916 Ink can provide transformational experiences for youth throughout the Sacramento area.