Words are known to have significant weight. In a digital era dominated by texting, a simple handwritten letter can carry the power to connect a community. At the Masters School, Masters Invested in Serving Humanity (MISH) and the Writing Center have aimed to deepen empathy and belonging through anonymous letters of appreciation and encouragement.
The Aerin Project, a non-profit organization created in memory of Aerin Glaser by her father, Jon Glaser, has been adapted on the Masters’ campus to cultivate a deeper sense of understanding. Aerin was an 18-year-old college freshman at the University of Southern California who passed away in 2024 after being diagnosed with a rare form of terminal cancer in 2019.
During her lifetime, Aerin would write letters to her best friend, Tilly, that followed the prompt of “Open when…” to support her during life’s challenging moments. Reflecting this, the Aerin Project’s core mission is to inspire gratitude and engagement in schools and other communities through handwritten notes of encouragement by imitating Aerin’s “Open when…” letters.
The project first came to Masters through MISH and the Writing Center during the 2025-2026 school year. Emily Kassoff ‘27 and Julia Panos ‘27, senior co-chairs of MISH and Writing Center mentors, were searching for a way to connect both groups through a service project, and believed implementing the Aerin Project at Masters would fulfill their goal.
The program originally started as a middle school initiative overseen by the members of the Writing Center. It was then integrated into the upper school through letter writing during Ninth Grade Seminar, upper schoolers visiting the Center for Inclusive Excellence and members of MISH writing letters of encouragement to a young cancer patient.
Marie-Louise Miller, associate dean for purposeful engagement, discovered the project through Glaser’s personal connection with a Masters faculty member, Senior Associate Director of Boarding Admissions Jack Stevens. As the faculty advisor of MISH, Miller desired to find a way to incorporate the Aerin Project and its mission to further foster meaningful engagement at Masters.
Miller said, “ I believe that handwritten communication is valuable to the person writing and the person receiving. I looked at it [the Aerin Project], and I thought, wow, this is really exciting. And we were also already trying to find a Writing Center-MISH collaboration project.”
Miller continued, “Fostering empathy happens really organically; when you’re sharing something real to you, when you imagine the other person feeling hurt, the way you felt hurt. I hope that when someone receives the letter, they feel empathized with, cared for, anonymously seen, or that they belong to a larger world of people who are also working through the same thing.”
Writing Center faculty advisor Lisa Green also believes that this form of writing is valuable to bring into our school community.
“So much writing in school is transactional in the sense of you’re writing to show what you know or you’re writing for a grade, “Green said. “ [The Aerin Project] is writing to connect, support, comfort and show empathy. It’s just authentic. I don’t think that schools offer a lot of opportunities for students to write in that way.”
Masters students further dove into the impact of the Aerin Project. At the Secondary School Writing Center Association national conference in March 2026, Writing Center mentors and members of the class of 2027, Gabriela Li, Helen Gao and Elaina Barreto presented their research based on the changes instigated in the writer of an Aerin Project letter. This is an alternative research angle—most research focuses on how the letter affects the receiver. The research was conducted by surveying over 100 participants in the middle and upper school after handwriting Aerin letters anonymously for anyone who wants to open a message when they are sad, stressed or happy.
“The survey had multiple questions. Like, ‘How do you feel after writing this letter?’ There are a lot of options: excited, relaxed, stressed or meaningful. Over 70 percent of middle school students chose ‘meaningful’ as one of their options,” Li said.
Glaser visited Masters on Tuesday, Oct. 6, to meet students who helped implement the project into MISH and the Writing Center, as well as answer questions that students posed about how he developed the organization.
Glaser said, “Aerin’s genius was this ‘Open when …’ concept because it’s very different from the way we think daily. So it’s not a birthday card; birthday cards are great, but birthday cards are for the here and now. But when you challenge somebody to write ‘Open when…’, what happens? You have to take a moment or two or three; you have to take a few minutes and think about what is going to happen in the future where somebody might need to hear from me.”
He continued, “She [Aerin] kind of lives through this project. When I see the kindness that comes out of these letters. And when I put her picture up on the screen, and I tell a little bit of her story, there’s something about her that just resonates with other kids.”
