We talk with Roland Legiardi-Laura the ED of PowerPoetry.org about how they became the largest teen poetry site in the US. Find out what the literacy gap has to do with incarceration in the US and how we can use algorithms to begin to quantify poetry.

Please check out the full documentary of To Be Heard – it’s incredible.

Episode 6

Speaker 1: This is Using the Whole Whale. The podcast that brings you stories about data and technology in the nonprofit world. My name is George Weiner, your host and the Chief Whaler of wholewhale.com. Thanks for joining us.

Today we’re doing something very brave. We’re leaving the borough of Brooklyn. That’s right. We’re traveling all the way to Manhattan today. In order to talk to an amazing guy named Roland. He is a documentary film maker. He is a poet. He is a teacher in the Bronx and he is also the founder of powerpoetry.org, which is how I know him. Listen to this interview.

I’m really excited because I am a huge fan of Power Poetry. Whole Whale’s been working with you guys for a couple of years now but I really want to hear and tell our audience the whole story of what you guys do, how you got there. So take it away, Roland.

Speaker 2: Power Poetry, the beginning of the story starts in 2002, when we had nothing to do with technology. We were a small writing program, hidden in a dark room off to one side of a public high school in the South Bronx. The program then was called Power Writing. The concept really has been the same since we started it. The idea was to get young kids, in those days it was truly disadvantaged kids, to empower themselves by mastering literacy. By literacy, I think there’s four components to literacy. Reading, writing, public speaking and listening.

So our work was around developing acuity, developing skills within those four areas. The delivery system we chose or was chosen for us, was poetry because kids, ever since the 1980’s, ever since rap, hip-hop and poetry slams, have been madly in love with this means of self-expression.

From that project, we evolved to the point where people wanted us to share the work well beyond the small number of schools and the small number of students we were working with. So we were sponsored by PBS starting in 2008. We produced a film called, To Be Heard. It was an award winning film, the New York Times called it the best documentary of the year. It’s the story of three of our young power writers who learn to use poetry as means to change their own lives and change the world.

In the course of making that film, we came upon a really interesting conundrum. How do you really develop a meaningful force multiplier? Something that goes beyond even what documentaries could do. Because documentaries, while they spread the word beyond what a classroom, a real boots on the ground classroom would be like, they are still limited in their audience. PBS supported us in the development of a digital form, a digital platform that would take the themes of Power Writing and inculcate this methodology in the digital