Dear Readers,
I hope you’ll indulge me today, as I write you wearing both my writer hat and my co-founder and board chair of the Lexington Writer’s Room hat. I’m also sad to tell you that neither of these things actually came with a hat.
It’s Kentucky Gives Day, an annual day of fundraising for Kentucky-based nonprofits sponsored by the Kentucky Nonprofit Network. This means it’s a great day to lay your tax-deductible (to the full extent of the law) financial support on us. Last year, it’s hard to believe we were not even open in our current space. We were painting and furnishing it, after the catastrophic fire that destroyed the building we thought would be our long-term home and was our dream space.
I said then, and still believe, that dreams are a renewable resource. Our current home in the old Common Grounds coffeehouse has quickly become the ideal location for us. So much so, it’s hard to believe we were ever anyplace else. When we first opened this little dream project—four board members, all of us volunteers (all of us still volunteers), who wanted to see if we could create a tiny tricked-out space for Lexington area writers to work, to support them in that work, and to build community. The nonprofit part is because even successful writers often can’t afford office space, and newer writers often have trouble finding the support and space to do their work, where they are always taken seriously and can take their work seriously. We created the LWR specifically to be an affordable place for that.
At the end of that first week, we had 13 members signed up, and then the pandemic shut everything down…literally that week. All 13 of them are still with us, and, as of this week, we have more than 100 writers who’ve joined. This year has seen us grow astoundingly. We have our first part-time employee, community manager Samar Johnson. We have an incredible mix of every type of writer, publishing in all different ways, at all different stages. We have established programs and partnerships to support underrepresented writers even further. We have succeeded in building a place where writers can do their best work and support each other in that. Which means we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
Growth means we need more resources, of course, but, for the first time since we opened, we’re in normal nonprofit mode. No literal five-alarm fire. I can’t wait to see what happens next for us as a whole, for our scrappy organization, and for all the amazing writers who come and work here.
So if you can spare a few dollars, please toss them our way today. This is what you’ll be supporting, and we appreciate you greatly.
You can donate here today:
https://www.kygives.org/organizations/lex-writers-room
Or at our website any day:
https://www.lexwritersroom.org/
Thank you for reading,
Gwenda Bond
LWR board chair (hatless)
p.s. Also feel free to ask any questions about the space, how we managed this, etc. etc.!