For more than a decade, Footscray based 100 Story Building has been working with children and young people to develop their literacy and creative writing skills. 100 Story Building CEO Susan Kukucka explains how they’re using their Creative Ventures Program funding to build on their work.
An action of the Victorian Government’s Creative State 2025 strategy, the Creative Ventures provides two-year funding to micro to small creative organisations and businesses to generate content, work and business opportunities for the future.
What is 100 Story Building?
100 Story Building is a social enterprise and creative writing centre based in Footscray, dedicated to developing creativity and literacy for children and young people through innovative art-based programs and community engagement.
Since 2013, we have collaborated with almost 50,000 young people and children, helping them build their self-confidence and take creative risks. We have also worked with over 2,000 teachers to support ways for creative writing to lift engagement, agency and wellbeing in school environments.
Our focus is on young people aged 6-18, and our impact work prioritises young people with a lived experience of socio-educational disadvantage, or who face other barriers to education, or who otherwise may not get access to vital arts programs.
Our programs have reached students across greater Melbourne and Geelong, especially around our HQ here in the Western suburbs.
What programs do you offer?
Our flagship programs include:
- Early Harvest, Australia's only creative literacy project supporting primary students to write, edit, and illustrate a professionally-published book. We work with teachers and schools on a narrative writing unit in which every student creates a story for submission and bring together an editorial board of Year 5 and 6 students who curate the best stories for the final anthology of short stories created by young people, for young people. Thanks to Hardie Grant Children's Publishing, our Early Harvest books are stocked in bookstores all over Australia!
- Story Hubs: Since 2019, we have supported schools to co-design unique, creative centres in their schools called Story Hubs. From these imaginative spaces, we deliver a transformative three-year program that builds capacity and inspires creativity and joy for writing for both teachers and students.
In addition, we run engaging school workshops tailored for years 1-9, ranging from choose-your-own-adventure epics to autobiographical comics to Instapoetry.
We also provide weekly after-school programs at our Footscray HQ and St Albans Community Centre, where young participants plan, write, draw, and exhibit all kinds of stories, from comics and zines to short movies.
We partner with other organisations to bring our workshops to new audiences.
You were a Creative Ventures Program recipient this year – what will this funding enable you to do over the next two years?
The funding support from the Creative Ventures Program will enable 100 Story Building to activate our new centre for young writers in Footscray with exciting new programs.
Over the next two years, we will curate programs designed to support young writers aged 6-18, fostering their creative endeavours, well-being, belonging, and confidence. Our programs will be co-designed by a youth-led co-design and advisory committee - the Futuremakers.
We will launch and grow three creative program activity streams that include after-school creative writing workshops that support idea generation, writing skills development, and connection among empathetic and courageous creators and communicators; multi-term writing and publishing programs and a major public storytelling project, in collaboration with an arts partner.
You recently launched your new building – tell us about this milestone.
After more than two years of exploration, planning, dreaming and designing, we finally have a new home here in Footscray. In May 2024, we officially opened the doors and invited our community of story champions to celebrate a new chapter, new levels, and new programs dedicated to young people’s stories.
The building redevelopment was made possible by funding from the Victorian Government through the West Gate Tunnel Project's West Gate Neighbourhood Fund. This support has allowed us to create a new and accessible space in Footscray, enabling us to work with more young people from the West.
Our new building includes a digital studio that supports new forms of storytelling and the digital delivery of our programs, thanks to equipment provided by the Stronger Communities Program. Our new facilities will also boost capacity for after-school creative writing programs, supported by Creative Victoria's Creative Ventures Program over the next two years, and allow for more young people to visit, explore, and create in Melbourne's west.
Do you have any examples of young/emerging writers going on to achieve success as a result of your programs?
One inspiring example is Darvey To, a participant in our inaugural Early Harvest youth publishing program. Since joining our program, Darvey has made remarkable strides in youth literacy and creative writing. Not only did she facilitate the Level 87 Book Club (an after school book club with teenagers) but she also represented 100 Story Building at the 2018 International Congress of Youth Voices in San Francisco.
Today, Darvey is an advocate for more Asian representation and mental health in creative writing. In recognition of her outstanding contribution to youth literacy and creative writing, Darvey received the inaugural Young Volunteer of Fraser Award in 2023.
Learn more about 100 Story Building and about Creative Victoria’s Creative Ventures Program.