A digital project to help families of prisoners interact with each other and the public has been selected as one of 10 winners of a $17,000 New Voices grant.

Spearheaded by Sandeep Junnarkar, an interactive media professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, the Family Life Behind Bars project will create a social networking platform that allows people to share information about surviving financially, emotionally, and socially while a relative is incarcerated. The site will also provide a window into their lives so that America’s mainstream can understand the impact of incarceration upon a prisoner’s loved ones.

One of the main goals of the project is to create a tool kit and template that will allow other disenfranchised communities to launch their own media strategies, Junnarkar said. A select group of CUNY J-school students will help produce content for the Website and guide participants.

Junnarkar's entry was chosen from among 312 applications for a 2008 New Voices grant. Other winners will start news and social networking sites for war veterans, aviation buffs, immigrant and Native American communities, and the eco-conscious.

The New Voices program offers seed money to innovative citizen media projects and is sponsored by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Funds for New Voices grants come from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.