Want an easy cause? Help a young writer win some cash.
The Poetry Society of America offers many scholarships, one is the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award, which is a $250 prize for the best poem by a 9-12 grader. Have any younger siblings who like English class? Potential writers, or better yet, budding writers are still high schoolers. And high schoolers like money and being rewarded for being cool. This contest would give them both. And you, being an experienced workshopper, perhaps, can give a malleable minds a push in the right direction, getting them off of the virulent strain of hard end rhyme abstraction-ridden poetry that so many high school students have been infected with. A chance to mentor a sibling or cousin perhaps, then if they turn out to be a badass writer you’ll always be able to look back and feel like you’ve contributed to the arts, right?