About Us
How ForWords Began | Our Advisory Board | How You Can Help
In its partnership program with the San Rafael Canal Alliance and in connection with local school districts, ForWords helps our students develop their own unique writing and speaking skills and publish their own writing and other creative work. We work with middle- and high-school students on writing skills and related language arts in all subject areas. Individual student and group workshop sessions are provided on weekdays, during and after school, as well as throughout the summer sessions.
ForWords has contracted with the renown University of California Bay Area Writing Project [BAWP] to provide teacher-consultants who work directly with our students and their teachers. 
The BAWP teacher-consultants are outstanding classroom teachers and are true experts in the art of teaching writing. ForWords provides a talented digital arts teacher for the computer-technology lab at the Canal Alliance who works directly with our students to produce compelling videos about their writing and school work. ForWords has also purchased computers, software, cameras, and other equipment and material which help our students develop important 21st century technology skills in conjunction with our curricula for improving one's writing, reading, speaking and production skills. Please visit our publications page to see the many wonderful publications created by our students.
Since ForWords initiated its programs in 2007, the vast majority of these students have graduated from high school and almost all have gone on to enroll in two- or four-year colleges and universities.
Ninety-five percent of all ForWords revenues, contributions and grants, go directly to student services. In 2010 ForWords expanded in Marin County and created a new program in Richmond, California upon the request of the Irene S. Scully Foundation. ForWords is also currently working on helping our students create a wonderful community mural through a grant from the Marin Community Foundation. Click here for more information.
ForWords Began...
ForWords was inspired by the life of Catie Siegel, a young woman who loved reading and writing and appreciated the extraordinary ethnic, cultural and intellectual diversity of our Northern California communities. Catie was kind and open-hearted, and, in that, gently self-possessed. In the last years of her life she worked at Borders Books, where she could always be found among the words and ideas she so valued. She was discovering, as well, her own voice and strength of character in the poetry and fiction she had begun to put to page. ForWords began as a tribute to Catie, but more importantly it has evolved as a means of opening for other students the world of writing, thought and art, that she had set-out to explore.