Students get chance to speak up, be heard
Author Eggers assembles International Congress of Youth Voices in S.F.
When Dave Eggers was in fifth grade, he made an illustrated book for a class assignment. “Gleeble” was the name of the book, which he has to this day. The book led to Ms. Dunn, his teacher, nominating Eggers for a young author award and a trip to Southern Illinois University for a conference of fellow nominees.
There, he met Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who was, at the time, the poet laureate of the state.
“She treated us like fellow authors, very seriously,” Eggers says. “To me, it meant a lot that all those adults had sort of taken the time to put us all together and give us a little bit of a boost, some recognition as young writers. I guess that always stuck with me.”
It doesn’t take much to make an impact like this, adds Eggers, who, alongside his career as an acclaimed author, has spent years assisting youth through the power of writing with his nonprofit 826 Valencia. “Sometimes you just put a bunch of people together and you give them that platform and you give them some time together, and that’s enough.”
That would be the conceit of Eggers’ newest project, the International Congress of Youth Voices, which he cofounded with Amanda Uhle. From Friday to Sunday, Aug. 3-5, 100 students, ages 16 to 20, will gather in San Francisco to learn from, and think with, a sterling lineup of accomplished writers, activists and world leaders.
The weekend will include a public event on Saturday, Aug. 4, at the Nourse Theater, where students will speak and read original work, alongside addresses by acclaimed writers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Khaled Hosseini, Jose Antonio Vargas, Eggers and others.
During the three-day event, a diverse
array of the world’s young individuals — the 2015 United Kingdom Young Scientist of the Year, a budding Oakland poet, a 15-year-old from Puerto Rico who raised $100,000 for Hurricane Maria relief — will listen and attend workshops with guest speakers like civil rights pioneer and Georgia Rep. John Lewis, and Tony Awardwinning Broadway playwright Brian Yorkey.
The project stemmed from Eggers visiting the global network of 826 centers — which started in the Mission District, providing under-resourced students with the tools to learn and write creatively — and its offshoots, and seeing the potential power in these student writers meeting one another.
“We started looking around to see if there were other international gatherings of young writers, and we could not find anything similar,” Eggers recalls.
Things moved quickly as an “‘if you build it, they will come’ situation.” Nearly all of those asked to speak agreed, especially after big names like Adichie and Hosseini, who both agreed immediately, signed on. Most students selected were nominated by 826 centers, while others were scouted for their work in countries like Nepal, South Africa and beyond.
“For us, the goal is really to be deeply inclusive and to make sure that this is not an event where only students who can afford to attend are there,” says Uhle. “So there’s absolutely no cost to be there.”
The lack of a precedent for something that seems obvious in hindsight — gathering budding teen leaders to inspire and enable their future work — serves as a testament perhaps to the larger cultural dismissal of young people and their ideas.
“We know that with issues that affect them, they’re the best spokespeople. We were reminded of this as a nation with Emma Gonzalez after Parkland,” Eggers says, referring to the #NeverAgain movement sparked by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after this year’s deadly school shooting in Florida. “No other voices were anywhere near as urgent, as clarifying and as morally pure.”
In San Francisco, students will be given the space to make their voices heard, on their own terms. After an evening cruise on Friday night, where Lewis will address and meet the students, and workshops with speakers on Saturday, the students will convene on Sunday to produce writing, in whatever form they choose, to be published in the Guardian’s U.S. media outlet.
It’s a moment of agency at a time when, for these teens, “the world is literally being recreated right in front of their eyes,” says Vargas, the former Chronicle staffer who founded the immigrant-focused nonprofit media organization Define American. “The systems themselves are being questioned, and I think young people must be a part of not only the questioning, but the answering.”
Citing the wave of nativist upheaval across the world, Vargas, who is an undocumented immigrant, will speak on the notion of citizenship at the Nourse, one day after the 25th anniversary of his arrival to the United States in August 1993.
The international gathering is a “sharp rebuke,” Eggers says, to the current political climate, but the congress was not created in reaction to the current administration. Similarly, Uhle says, listening to young people is not suddenly relevant in 2018 — it’s always been important.
“Some of these young people, you’ll find them leading the world in 10, 15 years,” Eggers says. “But we’re not going to prescribe a route for any of them. Really, what we try to do is provide a platform. And then get out of the way.”