by Ann Simms

Mac Barnett is turning a shampoo bottle over in his hands. The liquid inside is viscous, the color of blood. “We haven’t gotten all the kinks out yet. But we’re close,” he says, grinning mischievously.

“Rasputin Baby Shampoo” is one ofthe 300 products that Barnett and his colleagues are developing for the Echo Park Time Travel Mart. (“El Dorado Solid Gold Scrubber Pads” and “Mammoth Chunks” soup are two more of the works-in-progress.) This store, once opened, will be the retail counterpoint to 826 LA, an educational wonderland for kids that’s been up and buzzing since March of 2005.

Barnett, who is 826 LA’s program director as well as one of the store’s product developers, seems unconcerned about whether kids will get the shampoo’s allusion to Rasputin, the late nineteenth century Russian mystic. These days, what is a more pressing concern for Barnett is getting the Time Travel Mart’s lease signed.

Niggling details of real estate aside, the opening of 826 LA is a testament to just how successful its flagship organization, 826 Valencia in San Francisco’s Mission District, has become. Since its founding in April of 2002 by best-selling author Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and his longtime friend, Nínive Calegari, a former high school teacher, the nonprofit writing center has been helping students aged 6 to 18 with book publishing, after-school drop-in tutoring, in-school tutoring, writing workshops, and English as a second language classes. All of this work is powered by the energies and smarts of volunteer tutors. In San Francisco they number over 1,000.

Eggers and Calegari’s is a tale of how to take a successful, homegrown nonprofit on the road. In the last two years alone, they have added six new chapters (in New York, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Chicago and Boston) for a total of seven—much to the surprise of Eggers himself. Early on, he says, “I didn’t think for a second that it would grow beyond the Mission.” In a nonprofit world where it is rare to expand so quickly, the founders, along with an extraordinarily dedicated staff, have managed to build a strong national organization while allowing each site to develop its own unique character.

It was a small zoning issue that shaped the eccentric character of the place where it all started, 826 Valencia Street. Eggers first leased the building because he wanted to provide a free educational center. However, he soon learned that commercial zoning laws required that he sell either goods or services. The solution? Split the space up. The back area became the writing tutorial center. The front of the building became a pirate supply store with both goods (peg legs, eye patches, fake beards, striped shirts, etc.) and services (head-mopping, jokes-for-treasures bartering, etc.) for sale. Now part of the fun of opening an 826 is coming up with an eccentric storefront. 826 Chicago has “The Boring Store,” secret code for “The Spy Store.” Here, disguises and eavesdropping devices can be procured by young writers who supplement their burgeoning careers with a side job of espionage. 826 NYC carries superhero supplies. A wind machine in the back of the store allows patrons to test capes for their aerodynamic properties. At 826 Seattle, the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. pledges to make goods available to “adventurers, commuters, rocket scientists (professional and freelance), tourists, theoretical mathematicians of modest idiom, specialists of all stripes, small crews, large parties, et cetera.” And, of course, there’s Mac Barnett’s store in Los Angeles: Echo Park Time Travel Mart.

“The storefronts are sort of an opening rhetorical gambit, ”explains Barnett. “They prove we can build a superhero-supply store that looks exactly as cool as the one you’d imagine. And that’s the tone in the writing lab, too: Whatever project a student wants to work on, we say yes, let’s do this, let’s figure out how to successfully execute this idea.”

In addition to generating a sizeable amount of cash for its chapters’ educational programs, the stores have also contributed to thechapters’ sense of individuality. “You know,” Calegari says, sitting on the sunny deck behind 826 Valencia, “it’s not like a Bank of America franchise where we paint it grey and the font is red and here’s 27 handbooks for every single person’s job. The main balancing act that we need to negotiate is preserving excellence while making sure that every organization is organic to that community and that it’s not so cookie-cutter that it loses flexibility.”

This sense of individuality, set in a proven framework, is readily apparent in one of 826’s most successful structured programs: the storytelling and bookmaking field trip. At 826 Valencia, on a Wednesday morning, a third grade teacher shepherds her class past the pirate-supply store and into the workshop area—a tavern like space decorated with worn Persian rugs, towering bookshelves, and antique chandeliers with red, flame-shaped bulbs. A few kids spend a couple of minutes throwing themselves headlong into the mess of pillows at one corner of the room. Others take turns peeking behind acurtain that closes off the office area. Eventually they all take their seats.

The lights dim. The projection of a large, blank screen appears on one wall. To the left of the screen a volunteer writing tutor standsby a whiteboard. To the right of the screen a volunteer artist sits before an easel.

The magic begins.

“Welcome to 826 Valencia!” says the tutor with a big smile. “Has anyone ever been here before?”

Hands shoot up.

“What did you do last time you were here?” the tutor asks.

“We met Mr. Blue!” squeals a Latino boy with a cherubic face and a buzz cut.

“Yesssss,” replies the tutor, nodding gravely. “We’ll definitely need to talk about Mr. Blue.”

Heard but never seen, the fictional Mr. Blue is a crotchety editor who lives in the attic above the workshop, hidden behind columns of books and papers. He weighs 600 pounds and his body is covered with boils. He eats stories—children’s stories. But Mr. Blue won’t eat just any story. He demands that stories be creative and original. They can’t describe anything that comes from a movie or a book or a video game. If Mr. Blue doesn’t like a particular page, he will tear it out and throw it away. 

Once the rules are explained, the tutor writes out a story model on the whiteboard: character, character’s personality, habitat, friends and family, biggest wish and biggest fear. As the students fill in the blanks, a volunteer in the back of the classroom is quietly typing out a story, which appears up on the projected screen. The volunteer artist, meanwhile, illustrates the story the children begin to create.

The tutor guides the students through the story to a cliffhanger.  At this point, the collective writing stops and students finish the story individually, sometimes drawing additional illustrations. Once students complete their work, the pages are photocopied and bound. Students take individual “author photos” that are pasted onto the back cover. The books are then delivered to the terrible Mr.Blue.

From the workshop, the kids can hear Mr. Blue (played by an 826 volunteer) perusing the stories in the upstairs loft. “A four-inch leech named Mac who guards the castle!?” Mr. Blue mutters gruffly. Then, recognizing the sheer genius of this plot point, the implacable editor relents, his voice softening. “Well ... that’s pretty good!” The 826 stamp can be heard thudding its approval and the book is brought down and delivered into the hands of its proud author—a little slip of a girl with large front teeth and waist-length hair.

As in the retail stores, each 826 has adopted its own version of the original. 826 NYC’s Mr. Blue is Mr. Herman Mildew or, at times, his wife or mother. 826 Seattle has Mr. Geoduck (named after the largest biomass in Puget Sound: a gigantic clam). At 826 Michigan the children write for a Mr. Blotch; at 826 Chicago they vie for the attention of Admiral Moody. In the Los Angeles workshop, Barnett plunked down on a table their version of Mr. Blue: a humongous pink ear that sprouts out of a 1970s Fisher Price baby monitor.

The reason this activity, despite its specificity, has been such a successful export is that this disembodied character appeals to a specific age rather than to a particular community. “The reason a character like Mr. Blue works is that he appeals to the fantasy life of the elementary school aged child,” explains Elizabeth Galton, an expert in child psychiatry. “That’s true for a child living in New York City and it’s true for one living in Ann Arbor.” This type of play allows students to engage and nurture their creativity. At the same time time, these field trips are purposefully academic: teachers recognize what an effective combination this is and sign up for this field trip a year in advance.

826 Valencia began generating interest on a national scale “almost at the very beginning,” remembers Calegari, who not only helped Eggers start 826 but is now 826 National’s executive director. In the early stages, she was receiving multiple calls every day from people who wanted help doing exactly what she was doing. “What I felt at the beginning was, gosh, it took us so much time to figure out how to do some of the back end work of founding a nonprofit and getting everything up and running that, I thought, if I could save other people that time, I would love to.”

Before long, however, the number of eager callers was overwhelming. In response to the enthusiasm about the programs—and as a means of preserving their focus—826 published a sort of teacher’s manual, Don’t Forget to Write, which offered “54 enthrallingand effective writing lessons for students 6–18.” Meanwhile, the interest in a few communities was so strong that it started to make sense to replicate the entire program. “Once three people from a certain city got in touch with us,” explains Calegari, “we tried to get them in touch with each other so they could go and have a conversation. And from those groups people just got more and more serious about implementing the program.”

From the beginning, Brooklyn was an obvious next step. Eggers, whose literary publishing house, McSweeney’s, had a store in Brooklyn, had already generated some momentum around talented writers who were interested in tutoring. It was with these “friends of the family” that the first 826 sister site opened in Park Slope in September of 2004. Then, in March of 2005, 826 LA opened. That same year, Seattle, Chicago, and Ann Arbor followed suit in June, October, and December. Boston opened in 2007.

Calegari says she has turned down numerous candidates that just didn’t make the cut. But Calegari is quick to point out that the reason for not welcoming new cities into the fold has nothing to do with insider status. Rather, it has more to do with practical concerns.

 “We need to know,” says Calegari, “as a very basic but incredibly critical piece, that they’re going to be financially viable and be able to raise money within their own community.” New chapters are not jump-started with any seed money, nor do they share other chapters’ donor money (although some donors voluntarily contribute to more than one chapter). There is also the question of the volunteer force. “What’s great about Brooklyn and San Francisco, Seattle and Boston,” says Calegari, “is that when young people graduate from college, and they’re looking for work, and they’re finding their way in the world, they oftentimes come to these urban centers.” Besides, with a couple of new chapters in the works (Calegari won’t disclose their locations) and seven sites to manage, the application process is closed until further notice.

Joel Arquillos—curly black-brown hair, hipster glasses, the latest addition to the San Francisco team—is sitting at his desk in the 826 Valencia office. A printout of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration speech is tacked upon the wall to one side of his workspace. The photocopy machine around thecorner whirs almost constantly. 

“We want the 826 national website to be a community resource,” says Arquillos. “This could be as much a place where similar-minded nonprofits find out about each other as it is for people to find out about 826.” 

Created at the tail end of 2004, 826 National is an umbrella organization that provides logistical support to existing sites. And Arquillos, a San Francisco public high school teacher with experience directing nonprofits, is its new director of national programs.

In addition to the day-to-day tasks of fielding phone calls and tinkering with the national website, Arquillos has been working on organizing the 826 National infrastructure. To this end, he is preparing a password-protected online handbook for chapter members.

The file he shows me has none of the 826 signature playfulness. “The idea for the online handbook,” Arquillos explains, “is to create a living document to collect all the different forms that are used at the different sites. We want to have something so that when a new [chapter] comes on they will have all the information they need: bylaws, copies of successful grants, how to run a seminar, scholarship fliers, student evaluations, programs, job descriptions. Everything.”

In their early years, nonprofits are typically freewheeling and unstructured places, says Professor Nora Silver, the director of the Nonprofit and Public Management Program at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “But at some point, to sustain the operation, or to grow, let alone to grow in other cities, you need the kinds of systems that will support that. The question is, how do you grow the organization in a way that doesn’t deplete what you’ve been able to accomplish?”

When asked how he envisions 826 in 10 years, Arquillos is extraordinarily careful with his words. He squints. “How do I imagine it to be or how I hope it to be?” In typical 826 fashion, however, when he addresses both there is little difference between the idealistic hope and the practical vision. In fact, they seem to be exactly the same. He wants the existing chapters to be recognized widely and for their funding to be solid. He wants each chapter to have a closer relationship with its surrounding schools and tighter connections to local teachers. 

Arquillos pauses, training his thoughts on the bigger picture of what 826 is all about. “Since becoming a teacher,” says Arquillos, “I’ve been wanting to make sure that communities in need are served. That’s what it’s all about. The other day I was talking to Leigh [Lehman, the development director]. We were going to have a big meeting with Yahoo about funding. We were all nervous, you know. And then we were like, ‘What are we nervous about? Everything we’re asking for is for good. It’s not like we’re here to cheat and take their money. We’re here to ask for something that’s genuine. Everything we do is genuine.’ So we went in and we rocked the interview.”