Do the Right Thing

By Janelle Brown

San Francisco's 826 Valencia, located in the heavily Latino Mission district of the city, doesn't look much like a nonprofit writing center for kids—after all, the first things you will see when you walk in the door are an enormous bucket of lard, a barrel full of peg legs, and a puffer fish named Karl. (This is because 826 Valencia doubles as a pirate supply store—but more on that later.)

Go a little farther into the room, though—past the Arabian-nights-style tent, which doubles as a reading nook, and a copper caldron where grammar school kids can fish for plastic "booty"—and you'll come across a cluster of desks, where local students of all ages tap tentatively on computer keyboards while adult volunteer tutors coach them on grammar and creative expression. Here, the walls are lined with kid-friendly magazines, well-loved white boards, and the heavily hand-corrected galleys of books by authors like Jonathan Letham and Michael Chabon.

Push back just a little farther, to the chaotic command center at the back of 826, where books and papers and buckets of colored pens pile high. This is where you'll find 32-year-old Nínive  Clements Calegari '93, the director and heart of 826 Valencia, amidst a whirlwind of activity: simultaneously fielding phone calls and e-mails from teachers, coaching new tutors, writing grant proposals, binding homemade books, and ordering pizza for three dozen hungry high school kids.

"My days are all over the place, and I love that—it's never boring," explains Calegari, whose ardor for her job is as transparent as her speech is rapid-fire. "I am so lucky to be able to be working on all different sorts of tasks at any given time. Because I work for the students of San Francisco, and even more directly for the Latino students in this neighborhood, I don't think I could be happier doing anything else."

Founded by Dave Eggers, the unconventional young author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 826 Valencia is probably the most unusual tutoring center in America; at least it has the quirkiest sensibilities. The center offers a dozen projects at once, all geared toward teaching children writing skills—an after-school drop-in center where kids, 8 to 18, can receive free tutoring; workshops on subjects like "The Story of Me: Writing About Your Life and Your Family"; and field trips where school kids can make their own professional-looking books. The center also sends tutors into classrooms around the Bay area to assist overburdened teachers, dispenses college scholarships to kids who show writing talent, and organizes goofy community parties, like thumb-wrestling tournaments. Then there's that pirate store in the front of the office—a tongue-in-cheek endeavor that sells eye patches and peg legs to lure youngsters in—and that allowed 826 to set up shop in a building zoned for retail purposes.

All this is carried out by some 400 volunteers, who are, in turn, coordinated by Calegari, her "two and one-sixth person" staff, and dozens of rotating college interns. "I think I have three jobs at once," Calegari says, with mock exhaustion. Not that she's complaining. That's not her style. "Her energy is limitless, and that rubs off on everyone," says Dave Eggers. "No one can say no to Nínive when she asks for help, because she's always working as hard or harder than anyone, and because she so clearly knows what the kids at 826 want and need. She attracts and keeps volunteers through her passion, and her flexibility has also shaped what we are."

Born to a Mexican mother and an American father, Calegari seemed to spend her childhood in airports, traveling back and forth between her home in San Francisco and her relatives in Mexico, while trying to reconcile her bicultural identity. Her first name—pronounced "nin-a-vay"—reflects her Mexican heritage, a family name inherited from her Catholic great-grandmother and referring to the biblical Assyrian capital. "When I grew up everyone was Kate and Stephanie, and I hated my name," she recalls. "I didn't enjoy it until later." Her other childhood nickname was La Gringa, given to her by her Mexican relatives because of her light skin. At the time, she says she felt like she was "from two different worlds—passionately proud of being Mexican, but also so incredibly American."

Teaching wasn't Calegari's original plan. After an unusually blissful high school experience at a private Catholic school in San Francisco, Calegari arrived at Middlebury and majored in political science and art. She'd intended to go into international business, but was convinced by a demanding thesis adviser, Allison Stanger, to apply to Harvard Graduate School of Education. Stanger also introduced her to the importance of tough love in the classroom, later put to good use at 826 Valencia. As Calegari puts it, "It's a gift when you find someone who is tough on you, so that you want to work harder and harder. I remember getting my first A– from her, and it was worth more than gold."

Calegari's Harvard master's degree led to a job at nearby Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, but budget cuts shortened her time there, and she moved back to San Francisco, where she wound up teaching social studies at the middle-class Drake High School in Marin. The teaching environment at Drake was a far cry from Calegari's private school experience a decade earlier, and her introduction to the massive challenges facing public school teachers was eye-opening. "I had 146 students at Drake, and giving a social studies assignment, I'd want to weep: In order to give students meaningful feedback on one assignment, you're talking about three weekends of work! It's impossible to give kids the amount of feedback you want to. Teachers have way too many

students," she says. She pauses to do some quick math regarding the classroom program she's developed through 826 Valencia: "If you send 10 tutors into a classroom and they give 30 students an hour of feedback each, that's 300 hours of a teacher's time!" She laughs and concedes that she was just patting herself on the back. "[My back's] going to hurt from all the applauding I do for the program."

Calegari's next teaching job was demanding in a different way. She left Drake for a position at Leadership High, a brand-new charter school in San Francisco that focuses on teaching disadvantaged young people to be leaders. "That was my worst year, my most difficult year," she recalls. "You'd cry when you heard how badly these kids were treated—they got dumped by people, their trust was shattered, and it was so hard to get through to them. It was hard to feel like I was effective."

She hung in for two years, before marriage to French-Canadian accountant Jean-Claude Calegari took her back to Mexico. The couple moved to Cuernavaca, 40 miles south of Mexico City, in order to immerse themselves in Mexican culture and language. Jean-Claude studied Spanish; Nínive taught English at a private high school. Their plan was cut short by a death in the family, however, and they returned to San Francisco after less than a year. But the move, while unfortunate, was fortuitously timed. Dave Eggers, the husband of Calegari's close Middlebury friend Vendela Vida '93, had just conceived 826 Valencia, and was looking for a director. Calegari was the first person he thought of: "We needed someone energetic, innovative, someone who'd taught in public schools in San Francisco and also, ideally, had an advanced degree in education and had read widely about addressing the problems in city schools," Eggers explains. "And this person had to speak Spanish fluently. And the person had to be friendly and charming and personable and flexible and willing to work behind a pirate store. Nínive, amazingly, fit all those requirements."

It was a perfect match for Calegari, too. "It was all the things I'd been thinking about—it's in the heart of the city's Latino community, a huge opportunity to help teachers with what I think is too many students, too huge a task. We could alleviate their lives by bringing them smart people who are on the same page to take the weight off. It felt like a good idea—I just knew."

In July 2002, 826 Valencia opened with much fanfare from the local press. Within the first year, roughly 3,000 kids had come through the center or worked with its tutors in schools. Inside 826, the bookshelves are filled with professional-looking books, such as Talking Back, a collection of essays by juniors at Leadership High, self-published by students. "These are students who would never have been published," explains Calegari. "The kids felt so proud to have a book of their stories. It made me teary."

Calegari's primary feat has been ensuring that 826 Valencia isn't just another classroom, but a creative community and surrogate home for kids (and she plays the role of mother hen). As Vendela Vida observes, "she really talks to kids, calls them sweetie, takes their hand, and leads them to the computer."

"I think she is great at creating a warm, safe, fun, creative environment where these kids get beaucoup attention," says 22-year-old Bonnie Fandel, an intern at 826 Valencia. "I attended a great school, but I never got the kind of one-on-one attention that these kids get. I think that confidence is being built, and the kids are able to have dreams that seem possible to attain. How cool is that? It's amazing. Just so amazing."

The kids themselves are equally adoring. "She takes a very personal interest in the students who come," says Kevin Feeney, a senior at St. Ignatius College Preparatory who has made 826 Valencia a second home. "There's that old adage about how the teacher you absolutely hate you'll end up learning the most from because they demand the most. Nínive and her tutors revise this by taking that old, stern professor who actually knows what he's talking about and injecting him with a soul and a sense of humor."

The program at 826 Valencia continues to grow at hyper speed. Calegari's team is about to open their first permanent "writing room" in a local high school, a kid-friendly lounge, staffed year-round by volunteers. And this center is the first of what could become a growing network of writing programs: Calegari's inbox is full of notes from volunteers around the country who hope to open similar centers in their own cities.

Calegari's primary vision, though, is that 826 Valencia will give birth to a new generation of writers—or will, at the least, give children skills that will help them express themselves later in life. "I would love to know that making all these adults completely accessible to the students inspired them," she says. And then, thinking more pragmatically, she adds, "I would also hope that in 10 years, our students who are here now as students would be here as teachers and volunteers."

Janelle Brown lives in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Wired, Spin, the New York Times, Salon.com, and the Utne Reader. Prior to moving to L.A., Janelle lived in San Francisco, where she volunteered at 826 Valencia.