Our Team

Mission & Vision

Organisation History

Previous Partners

Maylia E. Sutarto

CEO & Founder
Maylia is a sedulous activist for children's literacy in their early education, holding a Master's in Information Management from Universitas Airlangga. A fond experimenter of writing, she has been teaching and developing IWEC's curriculum based on Montessori’s learning method for two decades now. She was guest lecturer for Bachelor’s Degree in Desain Komunikasi Visual (DKV) at Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) and Sociology at Universitas Petra.

Fairuza Hanun

Program Lead & Creative Writing Mentor
Fai is a creative writer, invested in humanities inquiry and care-based activism. They are a program operations officer and creative writing mentor at IWEC, program assistant for Jakarta Film Week international film festival, and co-founder of GENCONTROLZ Magazine. Previously, they were assistant editor for Asymptote Journal. Currently, they write articles for international magazines. After attending courses on care, they added bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy to IWEC’s curriculum.

Miristika Melfri

Design Lead & Visual Arts Mentor
On top of being a perceptive, spirited mentor, Mira is a storyboard artist with a Bachelor's in Visual Communication Design from Institut Kesenian Jakarta. She loves exploring art with others, finding more interesting ways to express everyone's stories with more than four years of experience.

Gabriel Martin

Comic Mentor
Martin is passionate about the world of comics and strives to elevate the Indonesian comic scene in his own way, with a keen eye for convincing storytelling. He has an interest in world history and in various forms of old world literature.

Nabila Tabita

Creative Writing Mentor
Bita is is a poet and a writer. Bita believes that the best way to tackle the world is to do things out of love and sincerity, which she puts in every single one of her creations. Her first ever published work is the anthology book called Through the Darkness, I will love myself. She also co-developed and wrote Berandai Jadi Kolektif Seni, a board game about lumbung for the National Cultural Week 2023. You can find her @urgeekypoet on Twitter, Medium, and Instagram.

Michelle Hadipraja

Marketing Lead
Michelle is a marketing lead & film enthusiast. Part of the core team behind GENCONTROLZ Magazine, they dabble in marketing, editing, writing and web design. They hope to expand on their interests of intersectional feminism, film and sociology in their further studies.

Qurrata Aiyunin

Illustrator
Kuro is a passionate illustrator and concept artist, whose hobbies are drawing and drinking coffee. Her life motto is to let it flow. Fun fact about her: tim bubur diaduk.

Our mission is to provide literary education  with a justice-based curriculum, where children will learn and apply critical and creative thinking. To guide them to think imaginatively and express their experiences through writing and illustrating, we must build and sustain a positive, safe environment which cultivates care, growth, responsibility and belonging in a community.

Our dream is to make transformative literary education constantly accessible in other Indonesian islands, and third-world countries, and empower connections to the land.

Our vision is the empowerment of children across the world, for their interdisciplinary and imaginative thinking to disseminate justice work in the world.

IWEC was founded upon the realisation of how youth voices are often dismissed or marginalised in the socio-cultural landscape, eclipsed by adult voices, thus making it nearly impossible to create transformative changes to an obsolete system. In the case of the literary arts world, we require the youth, whatever their background may be, to be heard.

It all began with a deep fondness for children, a passion for education and language. IWEC Indonesia’s Founder and CEO, Maylia E. Sutarto, is a home-school practitioner and educator for two decades. Based on the curriculum she experimented with her oldest daughter, IWEC was born, in support of youth voices for children's literature.

It was first launched in Surabaya, 2014 with a city-wide writing contest for children, themed ‘Menembus Dunia dengan Menulis: Tulisanku Mengubah Masa Depan Lingkungan’ (or ‘Breaking Barriers with Words: My Writing Transforms Our Future Environment’).

After years of hard work and dreaming, surviving through the pandemic, we are now grateful to have become a women-led team based in South Jakarta. Our professional, dedicated and caring team are who makes our programs and craft spaces sustainable.

CV Indonesia Writing Edu Center (IWEC) is a holding company based in Jakarta, Indonesia, comprising two divisions, a literary arts academy and an independent publisher, with a focus on providing safe literary spaces for children’s education. As an academy, IWEC organises for the increase of literacy and literary education for Indonesian children, offering a variety of mentoring programs such as Graphic Storytelling and Creative Writing, among others. As we believe that every child deserves to have their story disseminated, we are also an independent non-profit publisher, creating access for children to become published authors. We have previously been entrusted with mentoring and publishing books uplifting stories of local communities, including the children of Sigi in collaboration with Wahana Visi Indonesia and Australian Aid, as well as the villagers near PT Terminal Teluk Lamong, Gresik.

Among our many programs, we hold a bi-annual creative arts collective movement, Kolektif Karya Anak Bangsa (Collective Works of Indonesian Youth), or KKAB, launched in August 2014, with a theme on “Menembus Dunia dengan Menulis: Tulisanku Mengubah Masa Depan Lingkungan” (Breaking through Borders with Writing: My Story Transforms the Future Environment). It was dedicated to nurture literary arts culture and spotlight creative works by Indonesia's youth, especially those under 25 years old. We have held a couple of similar events in collaboration with Art for Autism Surabaya and a couple of homeschooling communities. KKAB was launched again with a bigger coverage on 17th December 2022, in the form of an exhibition which showcases creative works and performances created by youth, striving to be a safe space that invites other fellow youth to create their own works.

• Art for Autism