This is Stephanie, the executive director, blogging for the first but not last time. Today is Veteran’s Day and I am alone in the office catching up on quiet desk work. Since this is my first blog post perhaps it is appropriate for me to introduce myself. I have been at VOICES now for 16 month as the ED and I love my job. It seems to combine everything I care about most … writing, art, youth and young people, education, opportunity, downtown Tucson, philanthropy and giving back, innovation and creativity, ideas, etc. I could go on. You can check out my bio if you want to read more of the resume-type stuff. Here I get to be creative and weird but also strategic and entrepreneurial. 

One of the best things about VOICES is the dedication and talent of the staff and volunteers who make it all happen. I watch Katie and Krista, our writing and photography directors, teach youth about rhetoric and cameras and I’m blown away by their passion for sharing the art forms that have inspired them. They are not alone … Devin, Donny, Ben and Joshua, “the dudes,” are teaching about writing, radio, video and even the art of comic book narrative. Ashley, who is an MFA student in photography at The University of Arizona, is mentoring our photo youth and Lisa, who is earning a master’s in social work from Arizona State University’s extension campus is ensuring that our young people have the support they need outside of these walls to be successful within. I haven’t even begun to touch on the countless volunteers who make this happen, too. Maybe we can post interviews with volunteers on what they like about VOICES.

I have a meeting with said Katie in a few minutes. We are going to grab lunch and brainstorm more ideas for this website, which we are positioning to become our premier publishing outlet, so I’m signing off. But stay tuned. I am dedicated to sharing more with you about this fantastic organization from behind-the-scenes … even if that means a view from my quiet desk. Stephanie

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?