The Taos Teen Network's logo

The Chamisa Mesa High School CSO and the Taos Teen Team CCT shared a common goal. The two groups worked closely together and their efforts overlapped

The Taos Teen Network is a collaborative effort by students, teachers, and community organizations to provide teens with an on-line meeting place. This much needed network was born in thanks to the MIRA program and the site was built using MIRA grant money.

The mission of the Network is to empower local youth by giving them a voice and creating a dialog between the teens and the community. The Taos Teen Network creators believe that the empowerment of youth is a basic step to building a wholesome community. They feel youth need to be heard and listened to. Having a voice in the community enables them to build alliances with the community and with each other. Through these newly open lines of communication, the Taos Teen Network address the many problems that teens all face today: teen pregnancy, violence, drugs, health and health care, frustration with "nothing to do here", employment, attending college, self-esteem, and future building. The Network plans to train local youth in the tools necessary to voice their concerns through their local web presence, film and the local public access televesion station and the newspapers. Participants in the Taos Teen Network learn how to create messages using the technologies taught by the Center for Digital Story Telling, to create a web presence that will provide information about the community , including health information in the local area, job listings, movie and music reviews, and to build a list serve that will allow them to contact each other through the web.

The Network's online home includes a directory of goods, services, resources, and events in Taos, a constantly updated calendar of local events and happenings, and a chat room in which teens can socialize and make connections. The site also contains a graffitti wall for on-line art and tagging. The Taos Teen Network is an on-going project, which is constantly updated and revised to better serve the needs of the teens in the Taos community.