The Beacon United

The newsletter group is one of the most popular groups at Saint Luke’s House.  It is part of the LSP Day Program at the Southport site.  During the newsletter group there are six computers available for use by the clients, and the clients may only utilize the computers to complete one or more of the tasks that are necessary to publish Saint Luke’s House newsletter, The Beacon United, or to post articles on the Saint Luke’s House website (stlukeshouse.org) Tasks that must be partaken to successfully construct a Beacon include:  Writing, editing, copy layout, proofreading, and downloading pictures.  Clients perform one or more of the necessary tasks to construct the Beacon, and staff helps organize the clients work into a cohesive newspaper. Pictures help to highlight the appropriate topic of each article, and the layout of the articles help the reader to focus on the words of the articles.  No newspaper could result unless someone performs each of the desired tasks.

Some articles can be written about events that the clients attend, and other articles can be written about other topics that may be more creative, logical, or factual.  One barrier to writing an article is selecting a topic, and other barriers to writing a successful article include:  Utilizing creativity and logic, selecting appropriate sentence structure, obtaining facts, and organizing ideas.  It is a hidden fact that mental health consumers on average are more creative than the entire population as a whole.  Therefore, The Beacon United and the Saint Luke’s House website, in some ways, are more professional than other newspapers and websites. In any case, much work goes into publishing The Beacon United and posting articles on the Saint Luke’s blog.

The original Saint Luke’s House newsletter was known as The Beacon, but when Saint Luke’s House and Threshold combined their services, the title of the newsletter was renamed, The Beacon United.  The word United refers to the union of Saint Luke’s House and Threshold.  Generally, the newsletter is published every three months; but with the culmination of Megan’s term as Staff Editor of The Beacon, the publishing of the Spring, 2012 newsletter was unfortunately delayed.  However, the new editor, Lauren, is rigidly working on publishing a newsletter as early as the end of September, 2012. Lauren received the job as Staff Editor after Donna relinquished that title after serving only a short while as Staff Editor.