The pen pal project: How a Chicago charity taught teens the joy of letter writing
Organizer taught teens to 'write our stories out, and connect with other people'
When Maria Villarreal tried to set Chicago teenagers up as pen pals and introduce them to the joy of letter writing, she ran into one fairly significant stumbling block.
"Some of them were like: 'What's a letter? What are you talking about?'" Villarreal remembers, adding that a lot of the kids asked: "'Can I just give them my Snapchat?'"
"I was like: 'No, no, no," she told The Current's guest host Mike Finnerty. "We're trying to figure out if we can just write our stories out, and connect with other people."
Villarreal works for 826CHI, a non-profit based in Chicago that invited 62 students to take part in the Pen Pal Project in 2016. The students attended schools on opposite sides of the city, and over the course of a year got to know each other through letters. Their correspondence has since been gathered into a book called P.S. You Seem Like Someone I Can Trust.
The teens were given surveys to fill out, and then matched up based on their answers and interests, but the project was as much an exercise in literacy as a social experiment.
"We had to start very basic and bring in examples of letters," Villarreal said. "[We had to] talk about what the body of a letter looks like, what a greeting was, what the ending should be."
The next hurdle, she said, was helping the kids figure out what to write. Villarreal and her team told them to "just write anything."
"They ended up writing: 'Dear person,' and they describe themselves, and their height and when their birthday was, and then they asked a lot of questions, and then they said goodbye," she said.
"There wasn't a lot of vulnerability on the page, it was just: 'This is who I am, who are you?'"
You have to give a little bit more of yourself, tell them more, tell a story.- Maria Villarreal
The early letters fell short — literally — leaving the kids struggling to respond.
"When they received the letter and it was so short, they're like: 'Well what do I do with this?'" Villarreal told Finnerty.
She taught the kids that you have to give something to get something, telling them "you have to give a little bit more of yourself, tell them more, tell a story."
Villarreal said that as the kids began to share more their curiosity grew, "which was a beautiful thing to watch."
"Tenth graders were starting to ask eighth graders for advice around friendships. Eighth graders were really nervous about high school and definitely asking more about that," she said.
They wrote about biking trips and how they were exploring the city, she said. As time went on, they began to share stories about their families, how they connected to their parents, or how they felt about the parents they'd lost.
The letter writing continued after the project ended, Villarreal said, although some of the kids did take their new friendships back to Snapchat.
"They do I think still write letters every now and then," she said.
"They felt that there was more meaningfulness in a longer piece that they could hand to someone, instead of a text."
Listen to the full discussion near the top of this page.
This segment was produced by The Current's Alison Masemann and Julie Crysler.