In this breathless and at times funny speech accepting a TED Talk award, the author Dave Eggers discusses how he came to start a group of collaborative writing centers beginning with 826 Valencia . Eggers was motivated to create the after school tutoring and writing center by noticing the value of the human capital around him as a professional author. The original center combines professional editorial offices along with a space for students, creating a borderless professional and educational community.
Eggers attributes the success of the space and its empowering potential to support student writing to the absence of stigma and the psychological something “little bit different” which is fostered in a space stocked as a pirate supply store. In providing students’ a space to work on their own out of school writing, 826 Valencia “shines this beam of light on their work, their thoughts, their self expression . . . [it] is absolutely transformative.”
A strength of Eggars’ vision is that he says he is driven by what teachers need, demonstrating a respect for working professional educators that does not accompany many such projects. Eggars devotion to the teaching profession extends to the book Teachers have it easy: The big sacrifices and small salaries of America’s teachers, which includes a chapter titled “A day in the life” which provides a T-chart of a typical teacher’s day juxtaposed with a day in the life of a pharmaceutical salesperson.