Local resource center gets Siletz grant
Family Assistance and Resource Center Group has received a $6,430 grant from the Siletz Tribal Charitable Contribution Fund Advisory Board.
The money, awarded late last year, will go to FAC’s street outreach efforts to the homeless, used for purchasing much-needed tents, sleeping bags, and other camping supplies, to help the unsheltered homeless community keep warm through the winter months.
FAC, based in Lebanon, assists the homeless and unstably housed community to get the resources and supplies they need to sustain daily life and assist them to get back on their feet.
Lebanon Local wins two ONPA awards
Lebanon Local won two awards in this year’s Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association Associate Member Publications Contest.
The contest was judged this year by members of the Arizona Newspapers Association. It covered work done during the 2020 calendar year. Results were announced last month.
“We like to participate in this competition, not so much to win plaques to hang on our wall, but to get feedback from other journalists in other states on how we’re doing,” said Publisher and Editor Scott Swanson.
“We especially are interested in how we stack up against other similar-sized newspapers in Oregon. So we’re happy to get these awards, but the judges whose opinion we care about most, as I say every year, are our readers.”
The Associate contest includes a wide variety of newspapers throughout the state that are either not weekly (including Lebanon Local) or do not have paid subscriptions, which makes them “associate” members of the ONPA. Thus, it includes some with much greater circulation and staffs than Lebanon Local, including the Portland Tribune, the Capital Press and Eugene Weekly, papers with circulation in the tens of thousands.
Lebanon Local took first place in Best Feature Writing for an article written by Sarah Brown, which appeared in November 2020, about the arrival of Cambodian refugees in Lebanon 45 years ago and how they remember their time here, as well as the experiences they had before fleeing the war in Cambodia.
Second place in the Best News Writing also went to Brown, for a story on how a local resident survived the Santiam Canyon fires while working at Detroit Dam, which appeared in the October 2020 edition.
“We’re proud of Sarah, because her work was being judged together with entries from much larger news organizations,” Swanson said. “She does good work and it’s great that judges from another state were able to recognize that.”
Animal Blessings
St. Martin’s Episcopal and Our Saviour’s Lutheran churches celebrated the Feast of Saint Francis on Sunday, Oct. 3, with their annual blessing of the animals.
“God created all creation, and it’s not just people God created, but dogs and rats and guinea pigs and everything we blessed out here,” said Pastor Sarah Schaffner, who performed the blessing this year. “It reminds us that we’re part of a great, big world that God created.”
