The year 2020 was not a year for celebration for sure, but it was the beginning of Cape Fear Voices and the rebirth of Teen Scene. For that we celebrate! We made it through seven months of a pandemic when small businesses were hurting, people were losing jobs, and the politics were …well, enough said about that. Gerald’s mantra to people all year has been, “It’s not easy to start a new business in the middle of a pandemic, in a dying industry, and with no name recognition.” It has made for an interesting year businesswise.

However, the flip side of the coin was the enormous support we received from the community. Word traveled pretty quickly out of two local writing groups and the amazing people who live in Brunswick Forest and, particularly, the Shelmore neighborhood. Our writers now number in the 20’s.

We went from an 8-page paper of 200 copies in June to 16-pages and 800 copies by the end of the year. Our online distribution has grown to nearly 2,500 by year-end. We are proud to say we now have newsstands at Leland Walmart, Leland Lowe’s Foods, Leland Piggly Wiggly, Whole Foods on Oleander in Wilmington, and the Pine Valley Library at 17th & College in Wilmington.

We can’t thank Dan Dodge enough for developing our website. It is now up and running. We are even starting to get some hits on the site. We are developing several programs for the website that we hope will also be of interest to our readers and the community at large. Check it out at http://capefearvoices.org. If you need a website for your club or organization, we strongly suggest you contact Dan Dodge.

Advertising and donations have kept us going. We extend our heartfelt thanks to Deb Pickett, Financial Advisor at Edward Jones located in Brunswick Forest, Josh London at State Farm, in Brunswick Forest, Draw Fire LLC, New Hanover Printing, and Nolan Formalarie at DiscoverNC Homes, for being our primary sponsors to date. When you get the opportunity, we urge you to let all of our sponsors know how much you appreciate their support. Give them some business, if you can, and when you do, be sure to thank them for supporting us.

Debbie Channell of Athens, Georgia, has done our layout work from the beginning. However, after seven months of being locked down, her boss actually wants her to return to work. We will miss her as the Chief Designer of our paper! Debbie will remain as one of our Board Members.

We also want to say thanks to our Board of Directors for their support this year and to our Advisory Board. Their input and support have been invaluable. Recently, we brought onboard Giancarlo D’Alessandro, a young man to help us with layout work, who also has his own business. We also recently brought on our first intern – Cathryn Adams, a graduating senior at Early College High School, Brunswick Community College – to learn and apply layout and business skills for The Teen Scene.

One of our resolutions for 2021 is to make our paper more interactive with our followers. In addition to your stories and articles, we want to be more interactive with our community. We want pictures, art, poetry, and local news of interest. We want feedback on articles you like. We want to know about the events in your life that mark personal milestones and are worthy of print, such as a new child is born, someone is serving overseas in our military, someone is home recovering from surgery, etc. Be sure to check out our new “Celebrations” feature.

We also want you to buy our book, “The Great Lockdown of 2020: How I Survived.” All proceeds from that book will help pay our bills. Which is a good thing. “Thank you” for your pre-orders. See a related article and update on the book elsewhere in this issue of Cape Fear Voices.

And finally, we are working on our 1st Annual Writers Awards to be held in March 2021. We invite you to send us up to three nominations of articles that stood out to you. Whatever resolutions you make for 2021, make sure that writing for and reading Cape Fear Voices is among them! Most of all – have a safe, healthy, and prosperous New Year!