Write From The Heart

Now, Mossesso says, he's glad he did. He has discovered that he likes to write after all--at least the way the center lets him do it. "It's not like [writing] for an English teacher,'' he explains. "When we do our writing here, that's us that goes into it.''

Launched in 1989, the Community Literacy Center is the product of an unusual partnership between Community House, a 75-year-old settlement house run by a local Presbyterian church, and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's National Center for the Study of Writing. Teenagers from the neighborhood around Community House--typically 12 at a time--come to this red brick, six-story building to work on their writing and talk about it with college-student mentors. But it doesn't end there; the students are also encouraged to go public with their work.

Over the eight weeks the participating teenagers spend on a typical project, their work is transformed from simple words on the page to a potentially powerful tool for social change. The mentors encourage their charges to write about issues that affect them: gangs and violence, police harassment, stress, teenage pregnancy, school policies, and the like. Students gather information and seek out a variety of opinions on their chosen topic. Mossesso's group, for example, invited the police commissioner to come talk about his...