The Newsletter

LEE RHYANES JR.

Here is the first newsletter for the Voices Behind Walls.org website. Took some time last weekend to check out an HTML tutorial that helped me figure out how this webpage would appear. For a while inside my mind I've been planning a more time efficient way to update the site and send out news & updates more often. Since my move last year from NMSU back to El Paso for work, I underestimated how much time would be left to continue coordinating the Voices Behind Walls program and website. It's been almost a year since our last workshop along with a couple website updates in between. And now... here we are with a new outlook and plan to keep the website running and high hopes to get the program back in shape. Day in, day out, news on issues related to youth & juvenile justice is being reported and people & programs continue to put in work in effort to improve opportunities for young folks. With the good and the bad and all the other topics and responsibilities that demand our attention, its easy to overlook some of the problems and some of the accomplishments taking place. I'm hoping to bring attention to some of those topics with this online newsletter which will be updated on a monthly basis. A shout out to my mentor and friend, Joe Watts, who school'd me on Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) a while back, helping my bilingual self discover another way of passing a message through the code that is responsible for displaying the webpage you're reading now.

With that said I want to reintroduce some of our goals for the new year. In the past I mentioned plans for a Voices Behind Walls calendar to feature poems and photographs from past workshops. Recently, I discovered a printing shop out here with reasonable prices and a graphics team that is willing to help shape the vision of the VBW calendar into something we can start sending out. So along with previous plans to set up a scholarship or award fund for young people involved with the creative arts, we'll start with these goals, and see where we can go from here.

Shout out to everyone out there especially those people that have joined the VBW mailing list over the past few months. Also shout out to The Beat Within who have updated their website with a whole new design. It looks incredible! Peep the quote above from Bethany's poem titled "Before" published in Vol. 14.14 and check them out at The Beat Within.org

This Newsletter will cover March and April news, updates and notices for upcoming events. You will also find updates linked to the VBW Myspace which will include photographs and poetry audio recorded in past VBW workshops. Check back for newsletter updates at the end of each month (next one, May 2009).

Peace!