Numbers don’t lie. Philadelphia is the poorest big city in the country. Nearly 40-percent of the city’s students are not graduating high school and only 30-percent of eighth grade kids are reading and writing at grade level.

That’s why in 2009, Mighty Writers was launched with a five-word elevator pitch: To teach kids to write.

They do this through four-day-a-week writing academies at their six neighborhood locations in Philadelphia, at their Kennett site in West Grove, and at their site in Camden, New Jersey.

Over the course of a year—including summers—they take students through every genre of writing but always with the same goal: to get kids to think clearly and write with clarity.