Founded in 2008 as a literacy organisation by local writers, Deep Center in Savannah, Georgia has developed into a dedicated writing centre for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Its staff of nine – five full-time – have been led since 2014 by executive director Dare Dukes, and work with a team of 26 volunteers. Its budget is just over $500,000 dollars: some is received from local individuals, local family foundations and local corporations; some is received as national grants, from instance from Georgia Council of the Arts, Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation; and some is federal money via the National Endowment of the Arts.

Mission: helping young people to be confident learners and powerful agents in their communities 

“Disrupt the entrenched racist, classist narratives about young people from low-income communities”

Deep Center’s mission is a direct response to its social context: Dare Dukes describes Savannah as “an extraordinarily conservative place: politically, socially, racially. The society here has 27% poverty, with 39% of people under the age of 18 living in poverty, and this disproportionately impacts people of colour.” The rate of gun crime is high, and “the juvenile justice system has more court-involved youth than any other county in Georgia – not because the kids are bad, but because we have a culture of over-sentencing our young people.” This affects the mainstream media narrative around young people, which “is almost always about crime”.

The result, Dukes argues, is “a pernicious culture of blame around young people of colour”. And Deep Center exists to “disrupt the entrenched racist, classist narratives about young people from low-income communities, both for the people who hold those ideas, and for the young people themselves, who often internalise them in harmful ways. We’re trying to create a space where young people have a chance to think about those representations, and to think about who is saying them and why, and think about how true or not true they are in terms of their own experience. We’re giving young people eyes to see the structures that are negatively impacting them, to realise that their position in the world is not necessarily their fault. And then we’re trying to put them in places where, using creative writing, they can speak back to power, and be part of the conversation when people in power are making decisions about them.”

Activities: a ladder to creative leadership

Most programmes in Savannah designed to “solve” problems related to young people and crime are, says Dukes, “usually talking about controlling bodies: let’s have a thing at a certain time of day where we could put those young people. They’re not talking about the prerequisites to helping a young person to thrive.” Similarly, youth leadership programmes are “often about teaching kids how to conform, or be respectable”. By contrast, Deep Center works to inspire “creative leadership, using self-expression as a way to speak back to power”. It does this through a staged programme that becomes more focused and intensive as the participants age:

Deep Center works to inspire “creative leadership, using self-expression as a way to speak back to power”

1: The Young Authors Project

This introductory-level programme, designed for young people aged 11-13, takes place in schools, after school hours. Workshops are run by two trained volunteer teaching artists, who are themselves creative writers, and supported by “an English language arts teacher, who is our volunteer liaison for that school”. The project offers 11 weeks of programming, to a curriculum, with 14 children per workshop. The focus is “assets-based creative writing: we’re really assuming that the young person has everything that they need to thrive, we are just there to help them tap that and create opportunities for them. We tell our teaching artists that they should be listening 80% of the time that they are in the workshop, and that they are there not as authority figures but as co-writers, to learn with the young authors and to share their work. We encourage the young people to use their own life as primary text, and we don’t censor them in terms of content or language, as long as they can justify the choices that they are making.”

The project features not only writing but “a revision process, aiming towards publication”, and a closing party, in which participants read their work to each other and “vote on the most fearless and vivid writing”. The winners from each workshop then perform at a live event called Deep Speaks, open to the entire community.

2: Block by Block

Dukes initiated this intermediate programme for 14-18-year-olds as a way of holding on to the young people who most connected with the Young Authors Project. It “takes the assets-based approach to the next level: young people are learning how to identify stories and then also doing ethnographic research, looking at the institutions in a neighbourhood, and interviewing people”. Those stories are then written up “in whatever genre they want”. Participants “all heavily identify as writers” and receive 150 hours of programming.

This project also culminates in a party event, but Dukes’ primary aim is to “create opportunities where our advanced writers can be having a conversation with the people who are creating policies that are harming their communities”. For instance, in 2017 participants attended an annual community safety forum on the subject of youth sentencing, reading their “powerful poems specifically related to sentencing in Savannah to a room full of cops and parole officers, and juvenile court judges”.

3: The Youth Leadership Team

The newest tier of the programme invites the eight most advanced participants in Block by Block “to meet with the staff to give feedback on the programme, so we can have youth participation in decision-making for the programme”. They are also invited to go on “leadership trips”, including taking part in a spoken-word festival in San Francisco and attending an activist centre in Tennessee.

This project relates to wider work taking place within Deep Center addressing the composition of the board, to ensure representation of poor communities, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people. This is important, says Dukes, because: “Deep needs to be a ‘we’ organisation, not an ‘us/them’ organisation.” Such thinking doesn’t necessarily come naturally at an organisational level, not least because: “the assets-based framework that we use is the opposite of the missionary mindset, which is prevalent among non profits in the US. The missionary mindset assumes that the people you are working with are broken, and there is almost no conversation around the structural issues impacting these communities. We have conversations about how to break down privilege, how to be asset-based when we are talking about what literacy means, how to recognise that though young people may not know the Queen’s English, they have their own literacies that are of value.”

“Deep needs to be a ‘we’ organisation, not an ‘us/them’ organisation”

What next?

At present Deep Center is based in a public library, but Dukes’ ambition is to create “a centre where people can come and use creative practices as a way to do research about, and then offer solutions about, some of the issues in their communities. Creative writing and art do a uniquely good job of bringing people into a space and getting them talking in hard, risky ways about hard topics.” That centre would be “an intergenerational space”, where youth and adult stakeholders can research and write about complicated community issues, which he feels is important not only for dialogue but for adults to realise how skewed their ideas about young people are.

Dukes also hopes to expand the Block by Block programme, “so that we can have shorter spaces and workshops where youth and invested community leaders are using creative writing to investigate very particular topics”, for instance, policing. And he expects to continue to expand the leadership strand, creating “more pathways for the young people in our programme to connect with regional and national groups”. All this requires money, however – and: “It is extraordinarily difficult to raise money for this kind of work.”