Month: April 2018

Next Thursday, May 3rd, is a Big Day!

Because we are based in Northern California, the Community of Writers has the extraordinary opportunity to participate in the BIG Day of Giving, which benefits our region’s nonprofits. If you already plan on making a gift to the Scholarship Fund, donating on Thursday, May 3rd may leverage your donation even further with over $10,000 in matching funds available!

Last year, because of the many generous friends and alumni who donated during the Big Day of Giving, we raised over $20,000. Those funds helped us bring in new teaching staff, sustain our remarkable alumni community with many events and opportunities, and offer financial aid to talented writers who would not have been able to attend the workshops without it. We’d love to be able to better that number this year.

How you can help on May 3^rd:

1) Make a donation to The Community of Writers at Squaw Valley at www.bigdayofgiving.org.

2) Spread the word. Tell your friends, post on Facebook, and tweet about it. This is an opportunity to be part of something really big. Help us get there!

Thank you in advance for your generosity to our community; together, we can make a BIG impact!

Facebook: BIG Day of Giving

Twitter: @Bigdayofgiving 

Hashtag: #BDOG2018

This event is produced by the wonderful people at the Sacramento Regional Community Foundation.

Donate

We are excited to report that construction on our long-planned bookshop/headquarters on wheels has begun. The Paul Radin Memorial Writers Lodge (named in honor of our friend), this project will be complete by this summer. Yesterday, the first wall was pushed up by the journeymen on the project. 

Spearheaded by a major donation by the family of Paul Radin, and with substantial support of other donors,  this project was conceived to create a useful way for us to solve several problems:

• It will create a bookshop that can sell hundreds of staff books on site during the workshops, as demands for space in the Squaw Valley resort continue to grow more competitive.
• When our access to the venue ends on the same day the conference does, it will allow us to simply tow it away and complete our extensive inventories and returns off-site.
• The structure will also serve as our year-round headquarters (office) in Nevada City .

 With a fold-down stage for readings and presentations, French doors, built-in book cases, and an office, this promises to be a whimsical and useful abode for the Community of Writers. More details on Paul Radin and the origins of this project can be found here. The dedication of the tiny house will be Saturday evening, July 14, as part of the Writers Workshops Follies.

Send us your ideas…

The structure is now called The Paul Radin Memorial Lodge. However, we are interested in your ideas on its more informal everyday appellation, as “Lodge” brings to mind a larger structure and might be confused with other local buildings. The Paul Radin Memorial… __________… what? The name might evoke books, learning, writing, migration, travel… 

If you too would like to support this project and have your name on the donor wall, contact us for more details. 

One of our principle goals, always, is to keep the Summer Workshops affordable for our participants.

In the early days, our workshops shared the Valley with few other visitors, (cheerleaders! wrestlers! endurance runners!) but as the ski resort has prospered, the Valley has become an attractive year-round destination and the local costs of participant and teaching staff accommodations and food for the workshop week have risen dramatically.

With rising costs, financial aid has become essential for many of our participants. Offering scholarships and waivers ensures that talented writers from all backgrounds and means are able to attend, and that new and diverse writers continue to benefit from this opportunity.

The Continuum: Many of you reading this now were once recipients of some kind of financial aid. Some of you may still be strapped financially; nevertheless we hope you can send something. You may no longer be a student, or may have a better job, or you may have even seen your book published. Did your time at the Valley help your writing life?  If it did, I hope you will consider sending us a larger donation to help another talented writer have that experience.

The application manuscripts have arrived for the 2018 Summer Workshops. We are delighted and astonished with the work, and we are all looking forward to another productive summer with these writers and poets. In the next few weeks, we will be making admissions decisions. Those decisions include grants of financial aid for our most talented and needy writers.

Visit our Financial Aid & Scholarships page for more information on how you can donate to our scholarship fund, or to a specific scholarship.

Donations to the Community of Writers may be tax-deductible.

Please give Today. All gifts received on or before May 1 will go directly to our 2018 Scholarship Fund. If you would like to help, but cannot donate before May 1, please email us and pledge the amount you would like to give.

If you are interested in creating an honorary scholarship, email brett@communityofwriters.org. 

Or you can donate online today or send a check to:

Community of Writers – Scholarship Fund
PO Box 1416
Nevada City, CA 95959