12/10/2011
State Senator Slade Blackwell Presents Shelby County Arts Council a check for $5000
During the South Shelby Chamber of Commerce's annual Diamond Awards luncheon at Columbiana United Methodist Church, Terri Sullivan on behalf of the Shelby County Arts Council, accepted a grant check for $5,000 from State Sen. Slade Blackwell, R-Birmingham. The grant money is from the state’s Education Trust Fund. “All of this $5,000 will be used for art enrichment programs in our schools in Shelby County to help the kids,” Terri Sullivan, the art council’s executive director, said in accepting the check.
The money will be used to fund in-part the "Writing our Stories" program at Columbiana Middle School beginning in January. In its second year at Columbiana Middle School, the program began as "An Anti-Violence Creative Writing Program and has touched the lives of hundreds of students in Alabama and beyond. The program has been used extensivley with juvenile offenders as a method to write about their lives as a way of enriching their therapeutic experience. In public schools, the program offers students a creative outlet for thier voices to be heard. For more information about the program please visit the Alabama Writers Forum website. http://www.writersforum.org/programs/
The following are pictured (left to right) at the check presentation: April Weaver, Kathy Copeland, Terri Sullivan, Kevin Morris, Corley Ellis, and State Senator Slade Blackwell.
