For a magazine project, I worked with a group of girls who really weren’t excited about literacy.

They started to open up because we connected over our shared love of hip hop.

Gradually the kids realized that writing is a means of connecting with other people. At the beginning, one girl told me that she might fail English, but at the end of the project, she wrote this really incredible poem.

Watching her grow over the course of the year and seeing how a program like this can benefit so many different kids was the biggest highlight for me.