[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity,” John F. Kennedy advised American University students in his 1963 commencement address – and the power of his words has not lessened over time. This week’s Montpelier poet Ella Averbeck identifies some of the most common cultural factors that lead to intolerance and conflict between groups of people. But is it not the beautiful heterogeneity of beliefs and ideas, she points out though, that defines humanity?
Being Human
By Ella Averbeck, 12
[M]aybe we don’t all see the same colors.
Maybe we don’t all have the same fears.
Maybe we don’t all have the same political views.
Maybe we don’t all have the same color of skin.
Maybe we don’t all have the same practiced culture.
Maybe we don’t all have the same beliefs.
Maybe we don’t all have the same train of thought.
Maybe we don’t all eat the same food.
Maybe we don’t all enjoy the same subjects in school.
Maybe we don’t all like the same TV shows.
Maybe we don’t all live in the same place.
Maybe we don’t all wish for riches and fame.
And maybe that’s just being human.
