Building and fostering a broad writing community is a key mandate of the St. Eugene Writers Conference. We plan on accomplishing this in a number of ways beyond the Conference itself. 

1.  Grants will be given to members of Arts Councils in the Columbia Basin                               (See Scholarship page)

2.  Grants will be given to writers who will take the skills learned at the Conference back to their hometown and work to build their local writing community. The Conference will help with fund raising, with the logistics of readings, small min-workshops and whatever else might be needed to help build a local writing community. (See Scholarship page)

3.  Mini-Conferences will be held at St. Eugene during the year to encourage and inspire continued work on longer projects. Keeping the fire burning on a long project is difficult. By returning to St. Eugene for a weekend mini-conference during the year, writers will be rejuvenated and continue the often long process of finishing a piece.

4.  Youth involvement in writing programs. The youth of today will carry our stories into tomorrow. The conference is developing programs to bring youth into the writing community by creatively mixing new media with old. (See Youth page)