A double shot of good news

We’re coming to you this morning with two pieces of great news: a grant that will help support a second year of our Community Voices teen journalism program and impressive new members of Stet’s advisory council.

🧧 A substantial grant for Community Voices

The Pew Family Fund of the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties has awarded a grant to support Community Voices in the upcoming school year.

We founded Stet to help fill essential gaps in news and information in Palm Beach County. Community Voices is that mission in its most direct form: Stet News trains and pays Riviera Beach teenagers to cover the city where they live or go to school, and we publish their work at StetNews.org.

In May we wrapped up our first school year, and we could not be more encouraged by the results. Since November, the students have reported and published 14 stories about Riviera Beach government and development, including the city’s planned police headquarters, the impact of tourism and Riviera Beach being named an All-America City finalist. Not bad for kids who didn’t know they had the right to attend a public meeting before the program began.

Stet’s Community Voices team members are Micaja Etienne, Mikala Graham, Abigail Guillaume, Kelvin Verhovlyak and Myles Whigham. They work with teacher C.B. Hanif at Inlet Grove Community High School in Riviera Beach and Stet’s Liz Capozzi. This spring, WLRN journalist Jake Shore turned the microphone on our high school reporters and interviewed them for a story on the South Florida station.

The Community Foundation and its donors are making the second year possible. This generous grant will pay for our second cohort of student reporters and another year of coverage in Riviera Beach.

🤝 Meet the all-star additions to our advisory council

We’re excited to introduce four people who have joined the volunteer council that helps Stet grow. 

A sincere thank you, too, to inaugural council members Lenny Berger, Michelle Brown and Rick Rose, who are stepping down. We appreciate their support and thoughtful contributions. 

None of this would be possible without this one-of-a-kind community of Stetters. 

Thank you for reading Stet News.

Joel, Carolyn, Liz