*We are in particular need of mentors on mid-week afternoons!!!*

The Ministry of Stories is a local writing and mentoring centre in east London, where anyone aged 8 to 18 within our local community can come and discover their own gift for writing. We provide a safe space for our young writers to explore their creativity, and help build their confidence in finding their voice. Join us as our work takes us beyond our headquarters on Hoxton Street and into schools in Hackney, Tower Hamlets & Islington.

No previous experience necessary.

Your Role as a Writing Mentor
Writing mentors are key in providing one to one attention to the children in our clubs. They help the young writers to come up with ideas during the group writing part of the workshop. Later in the workshop, they sit with two or three participants, supporting them with their writing and encouraging them to come up with imaginative ideas for their story.

Writing Clubs
Writing clubs meet each week which enables volunteers to build a rapport with the children and have the opportunity to see them grow in confidence and imagination over time.

Each term, our clubs do a different project in a new writing genre. Past projects include Poetry, Picturebooks, Podcasts, Audio Books, Animation, Songwriting and Recipe Books.

Published Authors: Each term long project finds completion in a professionally finished medium; the children really get a great sense of how the written word can be appreciated in many forms.

One-off workshops
You will also have the opportunity to volunteer on school visits to the Ministry of Stories, where classes become authors in imaginative two-hour sessions.

Expectations
We expect all of our volunteers to commit to a minimum of six sessions every six months. Workshops are approximately two hours long, during the day, with 30 minute briefing and debrief sessions before and after. We are especially keen to take on volunteers who can commit to our longer-term projects and volunteer each week, or every few weeks.

Most clubs take place on weekday afternoons we have only one club on the weekend, that's on Saturday mornings.

We need around 100 volunteers each week in order to provide the one to one attention each child needs in these workshops. We currently run nine clubs every week as well as one-off workshops.

Join our team of writing mentors and help us to encourage confidence, creativity and a sense of play in our workshops where the children have fun with the written word by creating oodles of work appreciated by all.