An inspirational encounter with 826 Valencia, an after-school tutoring center dedicated to supporting underprivileged students in San Francisco, sowed the seeds for what would soon be locally adapted and implemented in Egypt in the form of the ‘StoryLab’ project. Its first edition, the immersive workshop ‘StoryLab: Aswan’, successfully took place in April 2019 and the next edition is already in the pipelines. 826 Valencia was set up in 2002 as a social project in the back of a store, where it provides free services to young – predominantly Latino immigrant – students in need of individualized support outside of under-resourced state school classrooms. Here, writing is considered the ultimate form of agency: it allows for telling stories, processing experiences, bringing imagination to life and building community. The creative minds behind StoryLab were immediately keen to emulate this model in a similar capacity in their home country Egypt, as Wael Omar shared with Egyptian Streets in a recent interview. In fact, taking the foundational idea a step further, Wael, who works for the Egyptian film production house Middle West Films and manages the Cairo edition of the International Short Film Festival…
‘StoryLab: Aswan’: a Nomadic Project Builds Community and Cultivates Creativity
June 27, 2019
