Every Drawing Tells a Story: How HeARTscribe Began
HeARTscribe began with a crumpled piece of paper rescued from a classroom bin.
On it, a Year 4 student had drawn himself very small, in the corner, in grey — while the rest of the page was full of big colourful figures playing football. He'd thrown it away because, in his words, it was "wrong". It wasn't wrong. It was the most honest sentence about being left out that I had ever seen.
The idea
I couldn't stop thinking about two things. First: children are already telling us how they feel — in the margins of their notebooks, in what they draw and what they throw away. Second: schools are full of teenagers who love to write and draw, and who remember exactly what it felt like to be nine.
What if we connected the two?
That became HeARTscribe: a creative wellness platform where children transform their experiences with bullying, stress and big emotions into art, stories and poems — with the help of young volunteers. A child shares a drawing; a trained volunteer (14+) listens to the story behind it and writes it into a short poem, story or comic; the pair becomes a HeARTfolio — the child's feelings, honoured and made beautiful.
What we've learned
- Children will tell paper what they won't tell people. The drawing is a safe middle-man between a child and a difficult conversation.
- Being witnessed changes everything. When a volunteer reads a poem back to the child who drew the picture, you can watch their shoulders drop. Someone saw me.
- Volunteers grow too. Our teenage writers report becoming kinder, more patient, and fiercely protective of the younger students. Advocacy is a habit you can catch.
Where we are now
Today HeARTscribe runs monthly editions — each one a themed collection of HeARTfolios like "Dreams of Belonging" — alongside school workshops and anti-bullying campaigns. Families, teachers and peers gather around the work, and the conversations that start there are the whole point.
Every drawing tells a story. Our job is simply to help the story get told.
Are you a writer, poet or artist aged 14+? Volunteer with us. Want HeARTscribe at your school? Contact us.