We recently connected with Ann Blakeslee and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Ann thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
One of the most meaningful projects I’ve worked on, at least recently, is the Write for Mental Wellness campaign, which is in association with our community writing resource YpsiWrites, in collaboration with the Washtenaw County Health Department. YpsiWrites is powered by the Eastern Michigan University Office of Campus & Community Writing in collaboration with the Ypsilanti District Library and 826michigan. Since its founding in 2019, we have partnered with numerous organizations in the community to provide writing-focused programs and campaigns. A few years ago, we began a parters with the Washtenaw County Health Department, which had launched a program called WishYouKnew Washtenaw to support adolescent mental health. They believed, and we agreed, that writing would be a terrific addition to this program as a sustainable practice in which youth can engage that can help them process their emotions and that can support their overall mental wellness. Thus began a collaboration that is now continuing to grow and thrive.
The foundational beliefs of YpsiWrites are that everyone is a writer and that all writing matters. Its mission is to make all members of the community, regardless of age or ability, feel welcomed, empowered, and supported at every stage of their writing journey. The core pillars of the organization are community, advocacy, inclusivity, and support. All of this aligned perfectly with the goals and objectives of WishYouKnew Washtenaw. We began by creating writing prompts addressing various issues and themes, and these evolved into worksheets that we could provide on the WishYouKnew and our own websites. We also began distributing these worksheets in the community, leaving copies at various businesses, the Ypsilanti District Library, and other community service organizations in the Ypsilanti community. The worksheets, so far, have focused on topics such as gratitude, self-compassion, and relationships, to name a few.
Because of interest in the program, it has continued to expand and now includes workshops on autobiography, journaling, and poetry. Additional worksheets and workshops are being planned, and a student advisory committee has been formed to assist with the visioning and materials for the program. It also is now multi-generational in its focus.
This project is being led by creative writer and clinical social worker David Boeving, MSW, and it also has a team of dedicated YpsiWrites volunteers who have been committed to creating materials and resources that will help people of all ages use writing as a tool to support their mental health. We believe this program is providing a valuable resource to meet a significant need right now in our communities.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’d like to focus here mostly on YpsiWrites, which was an idea that began to take shape several years ago. In 2010, I began directing the University Writing Center at Eastern Michigan University. Our team, from the start, had an expansive view of the role and potential for writing centers. As a result, we quickly expanded from being a single-room entity focused just on tutoring students one-to-one to being a multi-site (we call them satellites) writing center that offers a range of writing support, resources, and services to undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff. In short, we support all writers at EMU. Our satellite writing centers are situated in colleges or programs. So, for example, we have a Science Success Center that supports students writing in STEM disciplines. We also have satellites at EMU in the Colleges of Business, Health and Human Services, Arts and Sciences, and Engineering and Technology. These all provide more specialized and targeted writing support for students in the various disciplines in those colleges.
And in addition to tutoring one-to-one with students, which we prefer to call consulting, we also offer targeted writing workshops on a variety of topics (e.g., incorporating evidence, summarizing and paraphrasing, revising, polishing your writing, and more). We also have online resources, and we have a specialized writing support service just for graduate students and faculty.
When we learned, now several years ago, about a community writing center that another university in the state had, we felt like that would be a very natural expansion or extension for us. Why not offer to the community what we offered to our campus?
This led to our doing some outreach and then research. We reached out to the Ypsilanti District Library (YDL) since they would potentially be a perfect site for a community writing center. YDL has three locations that serve different demographics of the Ypsilanti Community. After listening to our ideas, they became very supportive, which has led to a wonderful, now multi-year collaboration. And prior to launching, we carried out surveys with library patrons and staff to gauge interest in this sort of entity. We also formed a collaboration with 826michigan, which was already serving and supporting youth in the community in relation to writing. Our focus, we decided, would be on teens and adults; 826 would collaborate with us in providing support to youth.
And just like what happened with the University Writing Center on EMU’s campus, YpsiWrites, which was officially launched in 2019 and which was focused initially on providing one-to-one writing support and occasional workshops, quickly expanded. Actually, the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred within six months of our starting YpsiWrites, prompted us to pivot and provide virtual writing support and other programs and resources. So in addition to one-to-one support, we also now offer workshops focused on a variety of genres and types of writing (e.g., poetry, comics, song writing, children’s books, memoirs, blogs, resumes and job letters, autobiography). We have writing packets as well to support writers with various genres, and we have developed a number of programs, many in collaboration with other organizations. For example, we created a Public Art and Writing Tour with writing prompts for various pieces of public art in Ypsilanti. This was in collaboration with the University of Michigan Museum of Art. We also created writing prompts for the Embracing Our Differences art exhibit in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, and we created a Mystery Maker Challenge and a Pen Pals program to encourage people to make connections during the pandemic. These are just a few examples of our projects and programs. Currently, we have a Love Letters to Ypsilanti campaign to support the city of Ypsilanti Bicentennial. We also now have a Writers Room, which is a space where writers can come together in community to write and share their writing. Ultimately, YpsiWrites strives to provide support, resources, and programs that affirm and amplify the voices of all writers in the community.
Finally, YpsiWrites is powered by a small group of dedicated coordinators and a larger group of passionate volunteers. Our coordinators have backgrounds in writing, linguistics, children’s literature, and social work. My co-founder, Cathy Fleischer, is Professor Emeritus of English Education at EMU, and I am a Professor of Written Communication at EMU with a background in technical and professional writing and scientific communication. I direct the Office of Campus & Community Writing, which houses YpsiWrites, the University Writing Center, as well as the Writing Across the Curriculum program at EMU and the Eastern Michigan Writing Project. I am committed to community engagement and service, both in my local community and in my larger professional community. I have been an officer for the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and for the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum, and I am currently the Associate Publisher of Books for the WAC Clearinghouse. Writing, in all forms and contexts, is something about which I am extremely passionate.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Our mission is to make all members of the community, regardless of age or ability, feel welcomed, empowered, and supported at every stage of their writing journey. This mission drives everything we do. Our passion does as well. We strive to make sure that all of the support, programs, and resources we offer and create align with our mission. We collaborate and partner with other area community organizations whose missions also align with ours. That’s the reason our mental wellness campaign is seeing the success it is. The Washtenaw County Health Department and its WishYouKnew Washtenaw campaign is striving to support teens in the area of mental wellness — and to destigmatize mental illness. Writing, and the opportunities it provides for individuals to process and express feelings, are significant tools in this.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Building our audience on social media has been extremely important for us, and we certainly have had our share of starts and fits. I think probably most important for us was building our brand, and that did not happen immediately. Thankfully, with the support of area designer Yen Azzaro, we developed a great logo for YpsiWrites, which served as a launchpad for us and for our branding. We also have enlisted the support of two designers from Catchafire, an organization that supports nonprofits with professional volunteers who are specialists in various areas. They helped refine our brand, and our talented graduate assistants, one of whom had a background in public relations, helped us create our brand guidelines.
All of this back-end work isn’t glamorous, but it’s really essential for developing a visual identity and presence, and that is what we have carried into our social media. Our two primary platforms have been Facebook and Instagram. We use these primarily to publicize our programs, and we have been diligent in following other organizations that also target the communities we’re trying to reach. In other words, I think our strategy on social media has been a collaborative one. I’m certainly not an expert in this realm, but we have had some very talented and dedicated graduate assistants who have worked hard to create meaningful and attention-grabbing content and designs. Our posts are colorful, eye-catching, and identifiable. We also could not have done any of it without Canva Pro, which has been an essential design tool for us.
We take every opportunity we can to encourage people to like and follow our accounts. We cast our nets wide and invite as many members of the community as we can. It’s ongoing, and we still have a long way to go. We also want to shift from just promoting our programs to also providing other meaningful content and information. There is a great deal more we can do here that would be well-aligned with our mission and purpose. We also use our social media to honor our Writers of Ypsilanti that we select and recognize every fall — we select up to 12 writers who are nominated by members of the community. These are writers of any age and genre, published or unpublished.
In short, we put a lot of energy into social media as a way of building visibility both for the organization and for our programs. It’s essential. And consistency is key, in both posting and designing.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ypsiwrites.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ypsiwrites/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YpsiWrites
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-blakeslee-9a06923/
Image Credits
Kim Beneteau