Chapter 51
The idea for the programme had been forming in Marcus for three years before he did anything concrete about it. He had been writing around it in his journal, circling it in conversations with Nia and Leroy and George from the writing group, testing it against everything he knew.
The idea was this: a community-based writing and mentorship programme for secondary school students from under-resourced neighbourhoods in Kingston. Not remedial that word was the enemy, he had decided, along with all the vocabulary of deficit. The programme was about capacity recognition, about giving students the tools to examine and articulate their own experience and to understand that experience as worthy of examination.
He had been doing this, in a smaller form, within his classroom and his department. The writing showcases, the mentorship programme these were versions of the idea. What he was imagining was something beyond the school walls: a programme that could serve students from multiple schools, that ran in the evenings and on Saturdays, that brought in writers and artists and thinkers from the community, that created a cohort of young people who understood that their voices mattered.
He talked to George, who had been a headteacher for thirty years and understood institutional landscapes.
'Funding,' George said. 'That's the first wall.'
'I know. I'm thinking about that.'
'And staffing. It has to be properly staffed or it burns out the founders in eighteen months and the students lose everything.'
'I know that too.'
He talked to Leroy, who was entrepreneurially sharp.
'You need a founding cohort,' Leroy said. 'Six to eight organizations schools, businesses, community groups who buy in from the start. Not donors. Partners. People who have a stake.'
He talked to Nia, who understood space and how it worked.
'Where is it going to happen?' she said. 'Space is not secondary. Space is message.'
He thought about all of these things for months. He wrote a twenty-page proposal. He revised it four times. He showed it to Mrs. Baptiste, who read it overnight and came back with three pages of notes and the sentence: 'You should do this. I will help you.'
He showed it to a contact at the Ministry of Education who Priya had put him in touch with, a woman named Dr. Forsythe who ran curriculum development and who read the proposal with the attention of someone looking for both the gap and the value.
'The gap it fills is real,' Dr. Forsythe said. 'The approach is sound. The challenge is you're thirty years old and you're proposing something that requires trust across multiple institutional relationships. People will want to see that you can sustain it.'
'What do I do about that?'
'Start smaller than you think you should. Prove it. Then build.'
He started smaller.
He called the first iteration the Kingston Voices Project. Twelve students, two schools, one Saturday morning per week, meeting in the Pemberton school hall with his permission and Mrs. Baptiste's blessing. He taught it himself, with help from Claudette and Patrick from the writing group.
The first cohort was twelve fourteen and fifteen-year-olds. He ran the programme for eight months. At the end, they held a showcase not at the school but at a public library in New Kingston, open to the community.
Forty people came. The students read their work. A girl named Janelle who had been almost entirely silent for the first three months of the programme read a poem about her neighbourhood that made the room go quiet in the way good things make rooms go quiet.
Marcus sat in the audience next to Nia and felt the specific sensation of something becoming real.
Leroy, beside them, leaned over: 'This is it,' he said.
'I know,' Marcus said.
'This is the thing.'
'I know.'