Roots To Sky Creative Writing Workshops

K-12 STEAM education

East LA Antelope Valley LAUSD (select only if you have a district-wide partnership) County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

LA faces a growing gap in opportunities due to the dual crisis of underfunded K–12 STEAM education and decreasing access to creative employment, especially for low-income, BIPOC, systems-impacted youth. These inequities disproportionately affect students from underserved communities, limiting early exposure to arts education and later access to professional pipelines for viable creative careers. Our Roots To Sky Creative Writing Workshops feed two birds with one seed, alleviating these issues through free, culturally responsive, arts education in schools and spaces across LA County. These workshops offer a bridge across the increasing gap of inequity: We cultivate creativity and career readiness in our comprehensive programming. With arts funding in public schools at historic lows, this initiative meets an urgent need while building a long-term pipeline into the creative economy. By supporting these workshops, you are joining us in alleviating two of this year’s issues at once.

The “Roots To Sky” Creative Writing workshops series is a creative industry employment pipeline for high school students to cultivate their creative voice through publishing. 

Introduced to the work of great artists and inspiring exercises, participants ultimately develop their own work for publication. Each workshop session includes freewriting guest workshops by great artists (such as “Zine” creation with Kenzo Martinez), focused writing exercises, sharing each other’s writing, then closing with a word or phrase checkout. 

During our Summer Session or Semester-length residencies across Los Angeles county, students gain a deeper connection to themselves, the community and the world. Students of color especially benefit from the healing power of writing, taking control of their narrative as well as learning marketable tools within the craft. Participants enjoy developing this work in a peer-to-peer setting that offers a safe, loving, and encouraging environment in which to create. Each workshop series culminates in the publishing of a chapbook anthology that is a collection of pieces written throughout the length of the program.

With this specific funding, Roots To Sky will contribute to a more equitable Los Angeles by empowering BIPOC youth from low-income communities to recognize their voices as valid, valuable, and professionally viable. Our students will gain not only writing skills but also a sense of agency, emotional resilience, and creative industry readiness. In the long term, we envision Roots To Sky as a permanent program in every LAUSD district region, forging lasting partnerships with libraries, schools, and arts organizations. This would establish a replicable, scalable model of free, community-based creative writing education that bridges the gap between public school arts cuts and career access. Los Angeles will be home to a more diverse pipeline of authors, journalists, artists, and creative leaders who reflect and uplift the communities they come from.