Got Your 6, a campaign working to change the conversation about veterans and military families, is hosting its Storytellers event in New York City today.
By bringing together service members who continue to pursue careers as change makers and problem solvers, Storytellers represents one way Got Your 6 is bridging the military-civilian divide by uniting the government, the entertainment industry and nonprofits.
The Storytellers that will deliver short presentations include Greg Behrman, founder and CEO of NationSwell; Becky Kanis, who led the 100,000 Homes campaign and is now working on a new project called the Billions Institute; and Don Faul, head of operations at Pinterest. Each of their talks will be filmed, released and promoted widely with the help of partners including MTV and The Huffington Post.
NationSwell will feature these videos in the weeks and months ahead so that this celebration of veterans can continue well past Veterans Day. You can take action in support of the Got Your 6 mission by joining the conversation on social media using the hashtag #wagegood then sharing the videos with six of your friends.
In the meantime, here is a glimpse at highlights from the 2013 Storytellers event.
[ph]
Tag: storytellers
Want a Free House? Write Two Paragraphs to Win It
It’s like a writer-in-residence program, only permanent. A clever new nonprofit called Write-a-House is giving away homes in Detroit to a select few writers, in the hopes that it’ll entice them to come to the city and stay.
The goal is to support writers in need and, ultimately, to bolster Detroit’s growing creative community. At the same time, Write-a-House hopes to revitalize Detroit’s neighborhoods: it purchased abandoned homes in a high-vacancy part of town and it’s working with another nonprofit, Detroit Young Builders, which gives at-risk youth training in construction, to renovate the houses before giving them away.
Low-income writers of any stripe — journalists, authors, poets, etc. — and from anywhere are eligible to apply for the residency. The winners, chosen by a panel of literary types, will be asked to finish the renovations, live in their house for two years, blog about it for Write-a-House and actively participate in the local literary community. Then, they’ll get the deed.
The first three houses under renovation are all within walking distance of each other in a working-class, mostly Bangladeshi and African-American neighborhood north of Hamtramck. If all goes as planned, Write-a-House will fix up another three homes in another neighborhood the following year and then do it all over again the year after that.
“Our long, long term goal involves building a literary colony in Detroit,” Write-a-House says on its website. Who knows? Maybe years from now kids will be studying the Detroit Literary Renaissance in English class.