Meet Jenna Paul-Gin from 826 Valencia
By: Laura Stevenson
For the last three months, I volunteered at 826 Valencia’s Tenderloin Center located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.
826 was founded in 2002 by Ninive Calegari, an educator, and Dave Eggers, an author. They set out to support overburdened teachers in the community by connecting students with caring adults to help support their writing. Calegari and Eggers wanted to provide under-resourced youth with resources and additional help to lead them to academic success.
Their first location at the Mission center was running successfully and 826 National, a separate organization, started in 2008 to help other cities across America open writing and tutoring centers. There are now nine official 826 chapters in America. In San Francisco, two more locations were established: the Tenderloin Center in 2016 and the Mission Bay Center in 2019.
I worked as a Service Learning Volunteer, meaning that I volunteered for class credit at my university. I was required to complete 40 hours in the semester. On a few Mondays, I volunteered as a tutor for their podcast field trips where students from a nearby school would come and get the opportunity to turn the stories they wrote into a podcast that gets published by 826. Every Thursday, I volunteered to be a tutor at two back-to-back After School writing workshops.
The difference between the workshops and the field trips was that on Thursdays I saw the same kids each week and Mondays the students came from any school that booked a Monday trip. My role as a tutor was to encourage students with brainstorming ideas, using different writing ingredients, and help them elevate their stories to the best and most descriptive they can be.
On Thursdays, my supervisor was Jenna Paul-Gin. She is 34 years old and her official role at 826 is Programs Manager at the Tenderloin Center. She ran both the workshops I tutored at and taught each week’s lesson. I held my interview with Paul-Gin on November 21, during an hour we normally would have had tutoring, but it was canceled that day.
Jenna Paul-Gin stands in front of a painting of a forest inside 826 Valencia’s Tenderloin center. San Francisco, Calif. December 5, 2024. (Photo by Laura Stevenson).
Paul-Gin has worked at 826 for about a year and three months. At UC Davis, she studied psychology and human development. “I always knew I wanted to be a teacher” she said, “So, I started teaching through Teach for America here in San Jose. And then, stayed on at different schools, Redwood City, San Francisco, San Jose, as an elementary educator for 10 years. And so, I transitioned from the classroom to this role after teaching for a while.”
Paul-Gin noted some similarities and differences between working in the classroom as a teacher and working at 826 Valencia. She said, “I would say the obvious similarities are like getting to work with students. I would say it's a very similar population that I've worked with in the past. Working on a team, like in a school, depending on what kind of school you're in. But I was always within schools that were very team based and grade level based.”
As for differences, Paul-Gin said that she gets to work with kids in smaller doses, about six or seven hours a week instead of in front of the classroom. She also said that coming into this role, she now has more boundaries between work and home. As a teacher, she worked all day and night, but now she gets to work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and can stop after that.
She said some of the daily challenges for working at the non-profit were having enough adults in the spaces, keeping up the energy and stamina it takes to work with kids, and juggling working with new tutors.
“At an org like us where we work with so many different students, it's hard to feel like we are doing the best we can for every student all the time. We see them for one hour a week. Sometimes, they’re absent that week. How can we best support the amount of students that we're working with when we see them for like a really small part of their week?” Paul-Gin said.
826 Tenderloin has three distinct programs: In-school, After School, and Field Trips. They have in-school programming at Tenderloin Community School, or TCS, and then a newer partnership with Bessie Carmichael Elementary. In those programs, 826 staff and volunteers go into the classrooms and replace one of their writing blocks for the week. The After School program is a partnership with six organizations in the Tenderloin where kids workshop writing projects for printed publication. Lastly, the Field Trip program is where schools all over the Bay Area come for a one-time session, write stories, and get their podcasts published to SoundCloud.
Media and communication are very important tools at 826 according to Paul-Gin. She said, “One, I know it's really important to get volunteers in the door. And so, reaching out to people in the community to learn about 826 to come and volunteer because like so much of our programming is dependent on volunteers. I think it's very important for donors and I know a lot of comms go out for that.”
She also said media and communication are important for student writing to get out to the community. “Obviously, the publications that the kids make is very exciting. That's like a big part of what we do, like a culminating project for kids to see their writing in a book. That's always really special […] I know that like there's other partnerships like they had with BART and poems are written on BART or they had like a poem machine at some BART stations where it got pulled out. Our Mission Center had a partnership with a pizza store and they had the pizza poems on the boxes,” said Paul-Gin.
Paul-Gin said the 826 team is constantly working to get their program, impact, and their students’ voices outside the bubble of people that already know them. The volunteers, staff, and communications team are just a few different parts that make the organization operate. At 826, students are able to be creative and produce writing that showcases their true selves with much support.
