About

Our Mission

Brink Literacy Project is devoted to utilizing the power of storytelling to positively affect the lives of people on the brink. Through our education, community, and publishing divisions, our nonprofit works worldwide to foster a love of literature, increase literacy rates, and use storytelling to empower underserved communities.

Our Education division delivers innovative literacy and storytelling programs with a focus on increasing literacy rates and assisting personal development through storytelling. We have a strong focus on bringing our initiatives to low-income, low-literacy, and marginalized communities, whether that means teaching in prisons or creating completely original curricula to tackle low reading proficiency in our youth.

Through our Community division, Brink forges partnerships with universities and other humanitarian and literary organizations. As a global community of readers, writers, artists, students, and supporters, Brink brings people from diverse backgrounds together to celebrate the beauty and power of storytelling.

Our Publishing division, headlined by our print journal, F(r)iction, is the culmination of our efforts to #PublishWeird, pushing the boundaries of what, and who, is accepted in the literary world and providing a platform for underrepresented and trailblazing voices alike.

All our programs, courses, and curriculum are designed to embrace bottom-up solutions, empower individuals to believe in themselves, and create a feedback process that allows us to improve and refine our services. We believe that the best way to support marginalized populations and voices is to give community members meaningful ownership in their educational experience, so our creation, delivery, and improvement processes all include adaptive collaboration with stakeholders.

Literacy is more than the ability to read and write

Through storytelling we learn to...

think critically and self-express

empathize and connect with others

dream and aspire to new heights

Our History

In 2007, Dani Hedlund founded this nonprofit, then called Tethered by Letters, on the belief that storytelling can empower people and change lives.

Though we started small, beginning life as a website that offered writers free educational resources, we grew over the next few years until our organization encompassed numerous education initiatives, community programs, and our own publishing platform. We reached out to educators, publishers, and other nonprofits who believe as passionately as we do that storytelling can affect positive change. We drank a lot of coffee and went through so many red pens, and when we finally took a breath we realized this was still only the start of what we wanted to do.

In 2015, we made a linchpin decision: to focus on developing new education programs designed specifically to empower low-literacy, low-income, and marginalized populations. After two years of preparation, we began teaching in the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility and trialing our new Youth Writing Program.

Our Team

Brink is run by a dynamic staff team and board of directors. Bringing together decades of diverse experience, our team works to deliver literacy learning and storytelling programs, launch the careers of brilliant writers and artists, and ensure that people in underserved communities have access to the education, resources, and support necessary to tell their own stories.

Meet Our Team