Meet the Generous Boy Who Collects Books for Homeless Kids

Six-year-old Blake Ansari has learned a lot about the problems facing poor families and kids from his dad, Nuri Ansari, who works with the homeless. So when he heard that there are about 22,000 homeless kids in New York City (according to the New York Times), he told his mom, Starita Ansari, “That means they don’t have a library,” Sarah Goodyear writes for Atlantic Cities.
Blake began collecting books and gathered 600 volumes, which he donated to a PATH (Prevention, Assistance, and Temporary Housing) shelter in the Bronx. Counselors at PATH plan to give the books to homeless children who come to stay there, and the kids will be able to keep the books.
Starita told Goodyear she hopes Blake’s book quest raises awareness of the problem of homeless children throughout the United States, who numbered 1,168,354 in the U.S. Department of Education’s 2013 study. “When you listen to the community, learn from the community, and help the community, you connect to your best self,” Starita said.
As for Blake, he’s got even bigger plans: He now wants to build a library for homeless kids. If he’s accomplishing all this in first grade, we can’t wait to see what he does next year in second grade.
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Can Writing Poetry Help Set Incarcerated Youth on the Right Track?

“You don’t understand what it’s like.”
“You never listen to me.”
Most teenagers make these over-the-top complaints to adults at some point during those angst-filled years. But for some troubled teens, these emotional statements aren’t hyperbolic. And those are just the kids that Richard Gold wanted to help.
When Gold left Microsoft 18 years ago, he started the Pongo Teen Writing Project, a Seattle non-profit that connects with troubled teenagers who are in jail, homeless, in the foster care system, or being treated for mental illness, and teaches them to write poetry to express themselves. Since 1992, Pongo has served 7,000 teenagers, providing them with volunteer writing mentors and publishing their work in anthologies.
Gold told Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour, “What so many of us struggle with is the unarticulated emotion in our lives, and when poetry serves that, it’s doing something essential for the person and for society.”
Through one of Pongo’s programs, writing mentors visit juvenile inmates individually for an hour, asking questions about their lives and emotions to guide them toward writing poetry about their experiences. The mentors transcribe what the inmates express, collaborate on revisions, then give the teenagers a chance to read their work aloud to the group.
Pongo volunteers do similar work at the New Horizons homeless youth center Seattle, helping homeless teens write poems, and hosting poetry reading events.
The workers in the juvenile justice system attest to the difference Pongo makes in the lives of the teens it works with. Warden Lynn Valdez at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, once an incarcerated gang member himself, said that after the teens write their poems, “the reward is, I think that they have actually released something that they have repressed inside.” King County Juvenile Court Judge Barbara Mack said that the young people she sees in her court “have never really learned how to express themselves. And Pongo gives them the opportunity to do that in a way that’s not threatening.”
It’s clear that poetry can be a powerful tool to make teenagers feel valued as they try to move past their rocky adolescences and become productive adults.
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