Our Mission

Following the Writing Center’s first core belief that anyone who writes anything is a writer, Outreach serves the University and beyond by honoring, supporting, and promoting writing and writers. Towards those ends, we organize Writing Center promotional events, writing workshops, outposts, conferences, the DePaul Peer Tutor and Mentor Summit, and other writing-centered gatherings that encourage, support, and celebrate the work of writers. We advance the Writing Center’s mission to “develop better writers along with better writing” by sharing the experience and resources of the Writing Center with students, staff, faculty, alumni and departments and offices at DePaul, as well as external community organizations.

Outreach works collaboratively with communities to assess and provide the resources needed to advocate for their diverse missions. We view all partners as colleagues and value our relationships as mutually beneficial collaborations among equals. Everything we learn from these collaborations contributes to our reflection and revision for growth as writing ambassadors. Integral to our outreach knowledge-building are our professional and scholarly activities, which enable us to contribute to and learn from the larger conversations around outreach theories and best practices.

We view our outreach as service that puts into practice DePaul’s commitment to Vincentian personalism and service to others. Furthermore, all of our outreach partnerships and scholarly efforts embody the Writing Center’s belief “that language in general, and writing specifically, shapes and sustains democratic processes” and that “writing is fundamental to an individual's participation in democracy.”