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Dave Eggers inspires youth to express themselves through storytelling

Bestselling author Dave Eggers believes helping young people learn to express themselves can make all the difference in the world.

In 2002, Eggers set up 826 Valencia, a writing lab for youth between the ages of 8 and 18 in San Francisco’s Mission District, where half the population is Latin American. The non-profit organization publishes booklets and newspapers and, because the place needed something out of the ordinary to attract visitors and kids, operates a store with pirate supplies. (You can get the city’s best deals on eye patches and wooden legs right here.) "If you can learn how to write well, you can start expressing yourself," Eggers says. "You’ll be able to bring order to a chaotic world that seems beyond your control. You’ll have power when you’re able to explain clearly what you need, what your dreams are, how you can overcome the problems in your community. If you can write extremely well, many doors will be opened so you can succeed in school, in life." Eggers cites Barack Obama as a case in point: "By writing two autobiographies, Obama wrote himself into existence. He is where he is primarily because of his ability to write. He is the best evidence that you don’t need anything but a pen and paper."

Doing good with money has always been important to Eggers—so important that it was one of the subjects of his second book, You Shall Know Our Velocity. Two childhood friends mourning the death of one of their buddies make a hectic, seven-day trip around the world to give away tens of thousands of dollars, discovering in the process that it isn’t easy. How do you decide who gets money and who doesn’t? And not everyone wants a piece of the pie.

"It’s clear that I’m confused by people who need money," says Eggers, who declined a seven-figure advance for You Shall Know Our Velocity to distribute the book through McSweeney’s independent bookstore channels. "Encountering beggars is so bewildering and confusing, because it jams up your cognitive system. Our natural reaction is, ‘Here, take anything.’ That’s what seems to me the most human, honest and logical thing to do. But then we always start thinking, ‘Wait, that’s not right,’ and that totally goes against our instincts."

But is giving money away such a good thing after all? In a 2006 Ode interview, Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of microcredit, was sharply critical of charity—whether it involved giving change to a homeless person on a street corner in India or welfare benefits to jobless people in Indiana. Yunus compared the recipients of charity to animals in a zoo: They’re given meals at set times but never challenged to follow their instincts to hunt. As a result, Yunus argued, they lose their ingenuity, just as a beggar in Bangalore and a guy on benefits in Berkeley are both deprived of their humanity.

Eggers considers for a moment, expresses his admiration for Yunus ("He’s awesome"), then goes on to explain how what he’s doing is different. "Microcredit doesn’t reach a remote village in Sudan like Marial Bai, where there are no phones, no Internet, not even roads. What they need is a school. Whose responsibility is it to build a school? The government’s, but that’s one of the reasons Sudan has a modern history of civil wars—the government wasn’t building any of these schools. So we need local community members like Valentino, who got the means somewhere else, to build a school so people can empower themselves.

"Building a school is different from giving money," he continues. "In a way, it is a loan. It will be paid back by a country that is safer, because the more people are educated, the less likely they are to go back to war. If we invest a little bit in education in developing countries, that’s an investment that pays great dividends."

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