Giving you a million words!

So just for interest we opened the CYC-Online folder on the CYC-NET server, hit the button which gives a count of the files ... and discovered that there are just under one thousand features in that folder – a nice accumulation of reading over our fifty issues, celebrated this month.

It’s a nice mix of writing – long and short, serious and not-so-serious, older and up-to-the-minute. Our profession has a good tradition of discourse and documentation, and much that was written a hundred or more years ago remains as helpful and instructive as what was written last week.

The CYC-Online collection is, of course, a small fraction of the growing body of material on the whole CYC-NET web site, but it’s always nice to punctuate our progress with this monthly offering. It has been particularly pleasing to have a small group of regular contributors (Leon Fulcher, Karen VanderVen, Henry Maier, Grant Charles, Mark Krueger, Mark Smith and Niall McElwee) who contribute a completely fresh viewpoint month by month, adding to the generous pool of writing which is accumulating on CYC-NET.

Gratifying, too, has been the response from the Child and Youth Care field around the world, who have surprised us by their numbers. While we average over a thousand individual visitors a day, there are days when we are overwhelmed. A couple of Thursdays ago (20 February) we had no fewer than 2066 visitors on a single day!

There are, however, no laurels to rest on. For our part we have greatly accelerated the growth of reading material on CYC-NET, and our sources have become wider and deeper. We long for the day when more of our practitioners, students and teachers will “try their hand" at writing. We don’t mind being a testing ground for those who will go on to become serious the contributors to our field's journals and books in the future. The Editors always welcome your efforts and offer any assistance.

More serious is that in June (only three month’s time) our generous funding from the Royal Netherlands Embassy in South Africa will end, and CYC-NET must become self-supporting as a non-profit organisation. In round figures, US$40 a day (Can$60) is our total technical and staff expenditure – which sounds cheap at the price, but it mounts up by the week and by the month. Your serious consideration of this will be important to CYC-NET.**

With their well-known modesty your Editors congratulate each other on a milestone achieved, and thank you, our members and readers, for your warm support.

Thom (Montreal) and Brian (Cape Town)