The LiveWire Peer Support Network promotes peer support as a process that enhances the emotional health and well-being of teenagers, college students, those in need of help.

Our mission is to provide a safe internet experience for your child. This is done through a "forum" or "bulletin board" system which was designed by high school students. LiveWire is divided into numerous categories, such as "Friends & Family" and "Health & Wellness," where teens support each other by discussing the problems and issues that they face in these often challenging years on the road to adulthood.

We offer young people opportunities to take on roles of responsibility. We have rigorous application processes, similiar to high school level exams and business resumes, that allow teens to be in charge of a subject area or to organize regular events designed to promote artistic prowess.

As a parent, your main concern is your child's safety. We can assure you that every reasonable step is taken to ensure that the users of LiveWire are safe from the inherent dangers of the internet. LiveWire's moderation team, consisting of members who have passed a challenging application process, works tirelessly to review all content posted on LiveWire and quickly remove any unacceptable material. Content which is not tolerated includes, but is not limited to, racist remarks, pornography, gratuitous violence, as well as any content that poses a threat to your child's privacy. Users are instructed to never reveal personal information like their family name, school name, telephone number, or address. Any user who the moderation team suspects of posing as a teenager is quickly and permanently banned from LiveWire.

LiveWire conforms to the Childrens' Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, and does not accept users under the age of 13. LiveWire also has an extensive Privacy Policy which ensures that only a minimum amount of personal information is collected from our users - none of which is sold or otherwise given out to third parties. This Privacy Policy can be read at the following address: http://www.golivewire.com/forums/privacy.cgi

We believe that our support system is a beneficial one to teenagers. It gives teens the opportunity to ask serious questions anonymously that they might otherwise be too embarrassed or ashamed to ask. We provide several options for seeking support, including the forums, resources (lists of informational websites and toll-free hotlines exclusively for teens), eHelp, which is a rapide response message system that only users who have demonstrated a record of providing helpful caring support, who are called Support Leaders, can reply. We encourage a supportive atmosphere by rewarding members for providing helpful advice.

LiveWire also provides forums for help on school subjects and homework, where users can talk about what they learned in school that day, get help with a problem they are stuck on, or find information about a particular topic. If members are using LiveWire in their spare time, we also provide forums for politics and religion, both of which foster an atmosphere for mature debate.

Delicate subjects, such as sexuality, do appear on LiveWire. We believe that sexuality is a healthy subject when discussed maturely, and strive to see that users are well informed on this issue. We discourage risky behavior, and hope that soon your child will find the confidence to ask you the questions that they ask on LiveWire. If you are uncomfortable with some content that you find questionable, LiveWire provides a content filter that users can enable to filter out the majority of overtly sexual content.

LiveWire is a community that is first and foremost for support, but we also also provide a growing number of other services such as up to the minute World news, stunning electronic greeting cards, and user created quizzes. We are a registered Non-Profit Corporation in the State of Oregon, USA, and have gone through great lengths to establish this free service, which began December 2000 as a high school project as a safe community for teenagers. I would like to once again assure you that all content on the site, while submitted by other members and not the responsibility of LiveWire, is moderated, and questionable material is deleted, protecting your teenager from Internet scams or any other potential harm that you may think could occur on the Internet.

When we visit other teen websites we see under moderated content, online dating services, and advertisements for diet pills. LiveWire disagrees with those sites who sell out and harm their users with such inappropriate content. We believe that if every teen who frequented an online community switched to LiveWire the internet would be a safer place for teenagers.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter of introduction.

Sincerely,

David Jones
Executive Director

The Entire LiveWire Moderation Team