The Benefits of Alton Support

Thanks to some generous support from the First Unitarian Church of Alton, we were motivated to come up with some new postcards to close out the year with the correspondence program.

The folks at the First Unitarian Church believe that the right kind of support can prompt some good works well beyond the walls of an individual church, so they regularly make donations to not-for-profit groups and organizations in the surrounding area.

They recently made a donation to our Poetry Correspondence Program, which we used to assist in funding the last round of letters and postcards of the year for our recipients. Marci and Tristan designed postcards (as seen above and below) based on Langston Hughes’s well-known poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Still Here.”


For the last letter of the year, we decided that we wanted the middle school and high school students to hear from college professors. So my colleague Jessica DeSpain collaborated with me on the composition of letters focusing on Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

More than 100 letters and postcards have already been sent, and the remaining 150 student recipients at Alton High School, Alton Middle School, and East St. Louis High School will receive letters and postcards from us in the coming days.

The additional financial donation from the First Unitarian Church of Alton was needed and appreciated, but more importantly, I think that their belief in the good of our project was an added and invaluable source of motivation for our approach on the last round of letters and postcards.