The #wwff11 @HomelessVoice issue is up! Preview the pages now and look for vendors on the streets of South Florida later this month.
I smile as I walk and pass people, because it’s a good way to fake that this place isn’t getting to me. Isn’t making me uncomfortable, which it clearly is, and I don’t want the nervous college journalist who’s with me to see that. Better to smile. A big, fake, plastic smile.
- Brian Thompson, Flager College adivser and Will Write For Food 2011 adviser, on his experience this year.
I believe the best students want to be challenged, not coddled. They want more adventure and less lecture. They want to test their endurance, not endure tests. Alas, not many adults agree.
- Michael Koretzky, co-organizer of Will Write For Food, on his blog reviewing this year’s event.
Will Write for Food 2011: Rewind
Twenty college students from nine different states as far away as Alaska arrived at a Ramada hotel in Hollywood, Fla. on the Saturday afternoon of Labor Day weekend. After introducing themselves to each other, professing their twisted love for journalism (and some of them their love of cats), they took a van a mile down Federal Highway to the COSAC homeless shelter. They ate roasted chicken and green beans for dinner with residents and where led on tours by the shelter’s founder/director Sean Cononie and his staff.
The next day, they started their 9 a.m. news meeting in a cramped office next to the shelter.
They wrote…
They photographed….
They designed….
An entire issue of the Homeless Voice in 36 hours.
In those 36 hours, students from across the country covered sex in the shelter, religion among homeless, and how the homeless help themselves, among other things. The September issue of the Homeless Voice let the students inside their home, where as visitors they were among the mentally handicapped and physically disabled shelter residents. See what they saw with their mobile pictures and the extras here on Flickr. Also take a gander and read what they experienced over the weekend.
Hard copies of the special issue will be sold by the shelter residents across South Florida and full PDF’s will be uploaded by the end of the month.
Sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists South Florida Pro, SPJ Region 3, and the Florida College Press Association, Will Write For Food is an annual event where students apply from across the country to spend Labor Day taking over the second-largest homeless newspaper in the United States.
The *final* final group of #wwff11: Christine, Gideon, Barbara and Mariam leaving the newsroom at 5:35 a.m - nearly a 21-hour workday.
Entering hour 14 at #wwff11 and Morgan is hard at work at the last story of the night: the Outreach program.
Hour 13 and counting: #wwff11 creators @mboyet and @koretzky listening to students’ reactions to the Outreach experience.
Bridge underpass was fenced up and empty. Sean says it may have come from the city of Hollywood. Outreach group heads back to COSAC.
What happens when you take two dozen students from across the country and let them take over the second-largest homeless publication in the country? Get a behind-the-scenes look at the 3rd-annual Will Write For Food event, September 3-5, 2011. Sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists South Florida Pro, SPJ Region 3 and Florida College Press Association.
