What’s in a name … no really, we’re asking.

Stephanie here. Lots of you know that this is a very exciting time for VOICES because we are merging with another youth voice nonprofit called SharMoore Children’s Productions, which takes stories that young people write or illustrate and brings them to a public audience, whether that’s theatre or in book form. 

Together, SMPC and VOICES will be a new agency with a brand new identity and name. Last night several of us got together on the patio of the Hotel Congress downtown and brainstormed what we might name ourselves. Picture this: Friday night, we’ve all come off a long week, we are feeling creative and a bit silly and any- and everything was on the table. Ideas ranged from the brilliant but already taken by NPR, “StoryCorps,” to the absurd and comical, “The Vowel Movement,” (thanks, Ben. We love you for this!) to the this-is-great-but-perhaps-not-appropriate-for-a-youth-agency: “The Speakeasy Wordhouse.”

So that leaves us with …? A list of words and phrases that we like but aren’t quite right yet. In no particular order, here are some of them that suggest who we are, what we stand for, and what we want to do:

syndication, syndicate, circulation, circ, stories, story, squad, posse, house, The Syndication House, StorySquad, wordshop, workshop, trust (as a collective, not a value … but that, too), Inc., ink, Ink., radiate, federation, contend, power, empower, youth, voice, the idea of “graffiti” as art and word and activism but not necessarily crime, ground, groundswell, ground up, word power, shape, camp, base camp, image, evoke, blast, generation, “gen” something, currency, ____ by ____, change, citizen, corps, productions, community (…whatever that means), re-vision, revision, (re)vision (kidding, Katie), home, family …

Hmm. We’ve got some thinking to do. Ideas?

Tags: activism, agency, circulation, downtown, Inc., SharMoore Children's Productions, Sharon O'Brien, Stephanie Balzer, Stories, syndication, Tucson, voice, VOICES, youth