Ministry of Stories

Ministry of Stories was founded in 2010 by Ben Payne and Lucy Macnab, who remain its co-directors. Based in London, it has a full-time staff of eight but relies on the support of some 350 volunteers to carry out its activities. Its turnover is roughly £500,000, of which approximately a fifth comes from Arts Council England as part of the National Portfolio; other income is raised through corporate partnerships (for instance, with Penguin Random House), and trusts and foundations. The “front” of the organisation is a high-street shop, which pays for itself and is beginning to contribute financially to other activities.

Mission: to champion the writer in every child

Ministry of Stories was inspired by a network of literacy centres in the US, devised and established by author Dave Eggers: each offers writing workshops to children behind the facade of a fantastical high-street shop that also generates income. Before founding the Ministry, its co-directors were working in the arts: Lucy Macnab as a participation producer at the Southbank Centre, and Ben Payne as literary manager and associate director at the Birmingham Rep theatre. Both bring transferable skills, if not direct experience, to the organisation.

Offering workshops within schools and an after-school writing club, Ministry of Stories focuses on literacy – but, says Payne, “in the broader sense of literacy: that understanding that being able to write yourself into the world is a key skill, an important part of living a good life”. Activities explore “every form of writing there is”, and are particularly aimed at “disadvantaged children who wouldn’t normally get access to this kind of support. We try to open them up to the possibilities of writing, to understand that writing is about expressing yourself, finding your own story. A lot of the children who come to us don’t necessarily know that this is something you can do for a living, and that all of the things that they enjoy, like games, songs, TV, films, involve writing. So it’s getting them to understand that this is a real job and also that they don’t have to be passive receivers of stuff: they can step into the role of being an active person within that.”

“People see it as hipsterville, but they don’t recognise how many children live here. There are about 30,000 children in the local area, about three-quarters of them come from low-income families”

Shoreditch, east London, seems an unlikely home for a children’s literacy centre: as Payne says, “People see it as hipsterville, but they don’t recognise how many children live here. There are about 30,000 children in the local area, about three-quarters of them come from low-income families, and for a significant proportion English is the additional language in the family.” It’s also an area in flux, with a high density of social housing, a white working-class community slowly being replaced by a more diverse community, and visible gentrification – “which, we have to be completely honest, we’re part of that shift.” The area was chosen because “there are lots of creative industries, lots of tech companies, lots of people who are interested in getting involved in creative projects like this. We know now that we are a hub in which many talented adults from these backgrounds can meet and support local children who can really benefit from their skills and experience.”

Building relationships

Ministry of Stories functions through building two-fold relationships:

1: With children

The Ministry works with roughly 900 children a year; it has strong partnerships with the four most local primary schools, and offers in-house workshops to schools across the boroughs of Hackney, Islington and Tower Hamlets. Those children might then choose to participate in an after-school club, of which there are at present three, each with space for up to 25 students. The American centres, says Payne, focus on the curriculum and homework, whereas “we want it to really be about writing. Although we will respond to the curriculum, we find responses to it that are creative and self-actualising.” For instance, an in-school project has involved working with children and volunteers skilled in animation to create short films explaining grammar.

The emphasis is on using writing as a tool towards creating a product, because the teachers with whom the Ministry works have indicated that the problem isn’t simply “getting children to write, but also finishing what they write because so much of what they do at school feels as if it doesn’t have a purpose”. After-school clubs focus on a different form of writing each term, including podcasting, recipe-writing, creating illustrated books, filming a soap opera and building an independent republic with its own passports and system of governance.

Children tend to attend the Ministry between the ages of eight and twelve: “That’s the age where, if you can make an intervention, even a two-hour workshop can mean that they think that writing is something that they can do.” Children are encouraged not only to write but to become participants in their local community, through interviewing people in nearby shops and discussing projects with their families and neighbours. “There’s a dominant narrative about the children that we work with: that they’re disruptive and challenging. We give them a role in the street, and people begin to acknowledge that they are part of this community.”

2: With volunteers

The Ministry has trained more than 8000 people as writing mentors to date; although their backgrounds vary, from retired teachers to mothers returning to work, the “standard volunteer profile” is in the 20-30 age range. There are at least eight volunteers to a class, and the ask is that they: “facilitate children’s ideas, validate those ideas and ask the right questions to get them out and build the sense that this is something that children can do”.

Payne says he and Macnab have been surprised by the enthusiasm and commitment of volunteers, whether in the classroom or installing shelves in the shop. “People really do want to feel that they’re part of a broader community. In this country we have quite a negative idea about what people won’t do and will do and actually, if they’re in tune with the mission of your organisation, they will give you huge amounts and also get a huge amount out of it. The way our cities are constructed often makes it feel like people are separated and only out for themselves, but it’s not true. If you give them the excuse to connect with each other then they will.”

What next?

Payne feels that his and Macnab’s lack of direct experience when setting up the Ministry was both a barrier and an opportunity: “We had to put ourselves in a situation where we were doing things that we had not done before, and making ourselves vulnerable in the sense of having to be brazen about asking people. But what we got very quickly was hugely positive feedback.” The duo are now keen to “replicate the model: what we’re aiming to do is create a family of these organisations across the country. Since we opened we’ve had about 100 enquiries saying can you come and do it in rural Suffolk, can you come and do it in Wales, so we know there’s a real appetite there.” The Ministry has already supported two organisations to set up similar outfits in Rotherham and Brighton, and is also working with projects in Edinburgh and Newcastle.

The Ministry model itself, Payne admits, is “labour-intensive and not everybody’s got the resources or the time to run a shop and a writing centre”. The emphasis now is on a the “knowledge transfer programme” through which people can learn “the five key elements of what we do”, but then decide for themselves how best to translate that into their own communities: “you can not have a building, you can do a touring thing, it could be temporary. The basis of it is quite simple and if you can enable people to have that simple idea and give them the training to do it then they can get on with it in their own place.”

Payne and Macnab are also investigating how their practices can be made available online, “so if you’re a school that’s nowhere near us, you can still set up a version of us and we provide all the resources you need to do it digitally”.