Ashley Evans | Staff Writer
A world with mammoth meat, dinosaur eggs, robot milk and time travel sickness pills. A land where the past, present and future all meet. A market where bottled-up dead languages and portable wormholes can be purchased.
Typically these fantasies would be disregarded as mere children’s delusion, but The Time Travel Mart is encouraging young students to dig as deeply as possible into such impossible inventions.
826LA is a non-profit organization that invites the young writer to explore a never-before-seen world of imagination and creativity. Through after-school tutoring and mentoring programs, children are encouraged to fully engage in the grandiose inspiration of their thoughts.
The Time Travel Mart is directly related to 826LA and serves as a venue through which children can reignite their creativity, through programs that most schools are unable to provide.
Joel Arquillos, executive director of 826LA, explains that 826LA is focused on “giving underserved students free access to support with writing, and connecting them with adults who care… Essentially, writing is at the core of what we do and inspiring kids to write, to use writing as a tool for learning, for imagining, and for telling their stories.”
826LA is one of the many chapters a part of the country-wide organization 826 National. Other locations include cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Detroit and San Francisco, where the original 826 chapter started. Each store has the same writing mission but different creative outlets; San Francisco store is pirate-themed, New York’s is full of superheroes, Boston has a “bigfoot research institute” and Detroit’s store has been taken over by robots.
“The idea (of the storefront) is to engage with the community to help us raise money for the free services we provide,” Arquillos said. “And to recruit volunteers, which are critical to the success of our work.”
Located in the hustle and bustle of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, The Time Travel Mart sells a variety of products, including groceries, posters, books, accessories, clothing and time-travelling supplies. Their motto is “Whenever You Are, We’re Already Then.” Allowing students to enter into a store that instantly sparks their creativity is one way 826LA and The Time Travel Mart seek to reignite imaginative writing in children.
“Sadly, a lot of pressure is on schools for kids to pass standardized tests and, as a result, creativity gets lost,” Arquillos said. “I think creativity is the spark that generates ideas and inspiration, and we lose that when we are pushing kids in one direction to do better on exams. They need the space and time to explore their thoughts and ideas, to be themselves and to be creative. Writing is one way we help them achieve that.”
826LA provides several programs for kids, including one-on-one tutoring, in-school projects where trained volunteers go directly to public schools, and workshops where local artists come and teach students a range of creative subjects. Students even have the opportunity to go on field trips to 826LA and write entire books.
Dave Eggers, publisher, philanthropist and founder of 826 National, discussed the importance of one-on-one interaction and its effect on children’s education during his TED Talk, “My Wish: Once Upon a School.”
“It’s been proven that with 35-40 hours a year of one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade-level higher,” Eggers shared.
The connection and consistency that tutors give to the kids provide a sense of mentorship that goes above the call of typical tutoring. Each child is given the attention and personalized help that best suits their creative and academic needs.
“826 is a place that really respects and admires creativity and kids being themselves,” Arquillos said. “It’s a place where you enter through a time travel store, so right there you already know you are entering a very different place. We believe in publishing, and many of our kids have already been published authors. We are very much about supporting kids’ voices and allowing them to learn how to tell their own stories.”
The opportunity for children’s work to be published and purchased is one way that 826LA reinforces encouragement and affirmation in the work that these students are producing.
“The kids will work harder than they’ve ever worked in their life if they know it’s going to be permanent,” Eggers said. “Know it’s going to be on a shelf, know that nobody can diminish what they’ve thought and said, that we’ve honored their words, honored their thoughts with hundreds of hours of five drafts, six drafts—all this attention that we give to their thoughts. And once they achieve that level, once they’ve written at that level, they can never go back. It’s absolutely transformative.”
The Time Travel Mart, therefore, serves as much more that a simple convenience store for the time traveler. It’s worth more than its five-dollar Forgotten Science Project or its Robot Milk, which retails for $19.99. The Time Travel Mart is the fuel for children’s imagination and the entrance to transformative, imaginative education.
For those passionate about creativity, writing and education, 826LA is always seeking willing and enthusiastic volunteers and interns. To discover more about getting involved with this national non-profit organization and making a direct difference in the lives of young students, visit 826la.org.