Benefit Concert for Network Support Services, Inc.
2:00 pm | $15/$12 seniors and students suggested donations
All proceeds from the concert, “Singing for Freedom,” will go to NSSI. The event is a project of the New Paltz-based The Arts Community.
Network Support Services, Inc. (NSSI) has been a leader in prisoner rehabilitation in New York for more than three decades. According to Executive Director, Anne J. Williams, the organization’s latest statistics show that “93% of the men and women who go through network do not return to prison.”
Williams says that the Network in the Prisons program currently offers more than 500 incarcerated men and women a year the opportunity to take responsibility for their own rehabilitation through participation in therapeutic communities and reentry planning inside six New York State correctional facilities. The program’s re-entry arm, Network in the Community, provides employment services, therapeutic support, substance-abuse prevention services, anger management training, and a wide range of other re-entry services to more than 500 parolees each year.
Together, Williams says, “the two Network programs offer an integrated and well-coordinated community-based approach that combines re-entry planning with individualized and highly effective services that break the cycle of criminal behavior and alcohol and/or drug abuse leading to incarceration.”
NSSI is based in the Bronx and its meetings are held in venues accessible to the majority of parolees and released prisoners, who are from the New York City area. However, this is too far for men and women who are released from New York State prisons who return to residences in Ulster County. Williams hopes that the funds and awareness raised by this event will help get a group started in the local communities to provide the same kind of re-entry support that is available in New York City.
“Community support is vital to successful re-entry,” Williams says. “The men and women who voluntarily participate in Network have undergone value transformation, have educated themselves, and look forward now to becoming stakeholders in their neighborhoods.”
For more information about Network in the Prisons and Network in the Community, see the web site www.nssi.org. Anne Williams may be reached by telephone at (845) 247-3943 or by email, awilliams@networkssi.org.
About Voce
Marybeth Egan Giammarco, Marie Lysandrou, Stephani Moorman, and Joanne Still blend as Voce (from the Italian word for “voice”). The women have been working and performing together since 1999.
The group was formed to sing a capella do-wop harmony, but Voce’s repertoire has expanded significantly to include both a capella and accompanied songs, including pop standards from the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
Voce has performed in a number of Hudson Valley venues, including the Rosendale Café, the Harvest Home Music Fair at Belleayre Mountain, the Clearwater Pumpkin Festival, and the Mohonk Mountain House. They have also headlined several benefits for area arts and civic organizations.