Our Story

Until 2007, when the Council of the Writers Guild East approached Tom Fontana, telling him “We found this pot of money labeled ‘Writers Guild Foundation’” and asking him if he’d like to take over this “Writers Guild Foundation.”

“What does it do?” Tom asked.

“You tell us,” answered the Council.

Fontana quickly assembled a small group of smart and funny people, “People I like to hang around with, some of whom can get stuff done” he remembers. They included TV writers, screenwriters, documentarians and spoken word artists. To this day, after having greatly expanded our membership, we remain at our core a group of smart and funny people who like to hang around with each other, some of whom can get stuff done. (Quick aside: Nowadays we are known as the Writers Guild Initiative, to avoid confusion with the WGA West’s Foundation.)

In the first meetings of 2008, the group made two profound decisions that established a foundation for who we are today:

• We’re not about us. The group isn’t about giving awards to each other or hosting panels where we tell each other how fabulous we are. (Yes, it’s a sacrifice.)
• We offer what we know and value most: writing. We share the tools of storytelling with those eager to tell their stories and who many have never had the access, time or confidence to pursue their interest.

As the second President of the Initiative Michael Weller remembers, in 2008 the group began thinking about “How can we be of service?” The answer presented itself as “If we’re looking for a way to be of service, why not serve those who serve us?” At the time, the country was deeply involved in the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Thoughts turned to service men, service women and veterans. (Those thoughts were reinforced by the group’s intention to remain apolitical.)

Through a mix of outreach and personal connections, the Initiative found themselves doing their first writing workshop with a National Guard unit in Columbus, Ohio.

“It was like a first dance,” the current President Richard Dresser remembers. “They were on one side of the room, we were on the other side. It was so tense. There were a lot of reasons not to trust this bunch of media types from the east coast.

“We looked at them, they looked at us… and we both said ‘I didn’t think you’d show.’”

As Weller says, “In that moment, we understood that a core value of our work had to be trust. With that, we can dance.”

Remarkably, much of what happened in that “first draft” workshop survives today in the workshops of the WGI:

• We work in intimate groups, two mentors assigned to a group of writers.
• We use a series of “tried and true” curated writing prompts — beginning with small tasks and then tailoring the prompts and tasks to the needs of the writers.

The mentors who attended that first weekend realized that they had a framework that could be used for many types of groups. Word of our National Guard weekend spread among the military. The Wounded Warriors asked if we might host workshops for their members. Weekend workshops with Veterans, held in San Antonio and New York, followed.

During those early workshops, mentors heard stories of the spouses, family members, and partners who now devoted themselves to being caregivers for their returning veterans. “We asked about them, and learned there were no programs designed for them,” Fontana recalls. After that, the WGI weekends for Caregivers began. You can see a video of that experience here.

Around the same time, the WGI was invited to the Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. As the “receiving point” for military straight from the front lines, the doctors and staff of the hospital suffered from “compassion fatigue.” “We were invited because they thought our program could be of therapeutic value,” Michael Weller remembers. “The workshops were filled with everyone from doctors and nurses to cafeteria workers.”

In every workshop, the writers are told that their stories are entirely their own.”We decided that we’d fly under the radar. No Press,” says Richard Dresser. “The message to the writers was — and continues to be — your story belongs to you. We’re just here to help you tell it.”

As more and more workshops were held over the years, a major evolution in the way they were conducted was overseen by writer and organizer Andrea Ciannavei. Andrea curated the writing prompts used by the mentors, debriefing them after each weekend to see which prompts helped open the minds and the pens of the writers. This list of prompts continues to grow and be used to this day — even on our social media pages, where Program Director Chiara Montalto-Giannini uses them in daily and seasonal challenges.

From our Veteran / Caregiver workshops in the 2000s, the WGI was able to extend its reach into other populations over the last decade, thanks to a growing team of mentors and organizers, overseen by our former Executive Director, Jenna Jackson. Among the new partnerships we formed:

• Front Line Covid nurses
• Victims of Hurricane Sandy
• Young adults living under the “Dream” Act
• The Muslim Writer’s Collective
• Witness to Innocence (exonerated death row inmates)
• Incarcerated persons at the Pendleton Correctional Facility, Indiana
• People who suffer from chronic illness
• LGBTQ Asylum seekers
• Survivors of Human Trafficking

“We realized we had developed something that could work with many different populations,” board member Lulie Haddad says. “We are not therapists and this is not therapy. But, as writers we know from your won lives the value that writing can bring to your life. Who know the empowerment that can come from writing your own story.”

There were two efforts to expand beyond the workshops. The first, “Pencil Pals” grew out of a partnership with the SAG Foundation, and linked writers with students as “pen pals” over the course of a school year. The second, “The Book Club” sent actors into schools, reading to students from books which the actors cared about. Both succeeded but were put on the shelf as we continued to focus on workshops.

In 2019, at the request of former workshop participants, the WGI began to offer a kind of “graduate school” for writers who were continuing to work long after their workshops. Held online, the writers could support and prod each other to finish long-term projects. Today, they have successfully self-published memoirs, works of fiction, children’s books, screenplays and plays.

Our experience with holding remote workshops proved to be incredibly useful during the pandemic.

While we have been true to our vow to “not give out awards to each other,” the WGI does award a fellowship — the Michael Collyer fellowship, named after the lawyer for a philanthropic organization. It supports a student over one year through the writing of a screenplay — from outline to polished draft — with a professional screenwriter as mentor and guide. The Collyer competition is held in partnership with the website The Blacklist.

And while we also don’t host panels to tell each other how fabulous we are, we do hold a fundraising gala every year where work produced in our workshops (with the approval of the writer) is performed by some of the country’s finest actors. The writers are flown to the gala, where they — and all of our writers — are celebrated.

“This is larger than any one of us,” Tom Fontana says. “Writers are people who look at humanity, the joy and suffering of living, and are compelled to write out of our feelings. It feels very natural that the WGI exists because that’s what we do… we care… we strive to make things better, if we can.”

“At its simplest,” says Dresser, “it’s realizing that everyone who has the wherewithal to sign up, to go into a room with strangers and write, has a voice. Being there for them to find their voice is what we do. They write things they didn’t realize they had. For some, it becomes a part of their lives.”

If you’d like to become part of the ongoing story of the Writers Guild Initiative, you can volunteer here or donate here.