Catholic Charities After School Program serves our youth in grades K-12 grade. The students come from large, limited income families residing on the Westside of San Antonio (zip code 78207/78237). The program provides these students with a free, safe place to come after school to do homework, arts and crafts, character education, outdoor recreation, and build positive peer and adult relationships. The program aims to improve quality of life for the children and strengthen families. This is the only free After School Program on the Westside of San Antonio and it places a high emphasis on family involvement to ensure the success of each child in the program. The Write Away program will provide these students with an opportunity that they may not otherwise have: to learn how to write a book, poem, or short story over an 8 week writing course. The final project will result in a published book of the students work. This will be in partnership with Gemini Ink, a local non-profit that provides hands on writing workshops to people of all ages. This writing workshop will focus around Bullying in Schools and how the students can overcome it. This past summer, the middle school program was awarded with the Team Up Challenge where they identified that Bullying was a major issue within their school. They developed a self-made video to express their thoughts about bullying and how to overcome it. Write Away will expand on the issue of bullying and allow the students to take what they learned last summer and transform it into a work of writing. This gives our students a way to be a voice to the "voiceless", namely those other young individuals in our San Antonio community that face bullying and need encouragement. The hope is that this will start a community wide movement to raise awareness to bullying and build character among our youth. The After School Program wants to share hope and courage because we want kids everywhere to not just be ordinary- but extraordinary.