What is sometimes hard to understand is that the appearance of a neighborhood is often a reflection of how the community members feel about themselves, how low their perceived social capital is.  If the community members feel disrespected, why should they give respect?  If no one is helping them, why should they help others?  If they feel powerless, why should they try and change anything?  Nothing they do will make a difference.  This is neighborhood depression.  People don’t try because they feel they don’t have the power over their situation.  But something changes in the collective neighborhood mind when someone decides to pick up trash around the bus stops one day.  Something changes when a store owner puts up a new sign.  Something changes when a group of kids gets together to mow neighborhood lawns.

When a few community members decide that they have the power to make a difference, even if it is a small one, something changes.  The actions of a few can start a ripple effect.  People will start to remember that they are worth taking care of, and so is their neighborhood, and they have the power to make a change.  The neighborhood depression begins to lift.

This is where Arts in Alley can come in and help neighbors to make a difference in their own community.  A mural on a neighborhood business is a way to signal, “things are changing, and the community itself can make the change happen.”  At an AITA event, neighbors get together, people from different communities work side by side and educate each other, seniors work with children, people from all walks of life work together towards a common goal.

Erin O’Donovan, MSW (one of Arts in the Alley’s volunteer leaders)

All that happened at Arts in the Alley this past weekend. Here are some photographic impressions (courtesy of the amazing and generous DJ Glisson at Firefly Imageworks). Want to get involved? Click here.

If you are able to – join us tomorrow and/or Sunday. Sign up here or just show up between 9-6 pm on either day. Help us paint a better future!

It takes a gallon of paint – $25 – to create a large tree as part of a mural.

And it takes a quart of paint – $10 – to paint a butterfly. Or a frog.

And it takes half a quart of paint  - $5 – to paint a flower.

Can you help us paint a tree, or a butterfly, or a flower and help Paint a Better Future for Richmond, and for Fulton Hill? We have created a special fundraising project through IndieGoGo so it’s easy for people to contribute. Click HERE to give – $25, $10, or even $5 will go a long way.

Between 1998 and the Spring of 2011, Offering organized four Arts in the Alley initiatives – in Shockoe Bottom, near VCU, in Beijing, China (yes, we know that one sounds random), and one in Church Hill. By the spring of 2011, when we started looking the next location for Arts in the Alley, my thoughts went back to Fulton Hill. I connected with Jason Sawyer and the rest of the fantastic people at the Neighborhood Resource Center and we started looking at possibilities. With help of the NRC and the community work teams we quickly identified a number of walls that could use some love and care – and with the colors Greater Fulton’s Future had chosen we sent our volunteer designers to work.

October 8-9, 2011 brought the most beautiful weather we could have imagined – and the most beautiful people joining us. Over the course of two days we painted 16 murals in all – 10 small window murals and 6 larger ones, the largest one being the Fine Foods Grocery mural that is a whopping 73 feet in length! Painters and paint-by-numbers experts (aka those of us who had not touched a paint brush in a good long while J) worked side by side on Saturday and Sunday, and slowly but surely parts of Greater Fulton were transformed by bright colors an even brighter smiles. Close to 100 volunteers pitched in for part or all of the weekend. But the one volunteer that will always stick with me is Mia. Mia was, then, almost five years old and is the daughter of friends of mine. Mia, like her little sister Lily, was adopted from China by her mom and dad, and they wanted to bring her to Arts in the Alley. I told them I would make sure she had a bucket of water and a sponge and she could help clean part of Miss Joyce’s building (from Miss Joyce’s Beauty Shop) until she was done – which, I assumed, would be after about half an hour: after all, we’re talking a pre-school little girl here.

Boy, was I ever wrong. Mia cleaned. Mia primed. Mia painted. With deep, sincere concentration. For more than SIX hours. When her mom gently tried to convince her that they really needed to go home – the next day, after all, was a school day – Mia replied “No mama, I have to help finish Miss Joyce’s house”. Mia did help finish painting Miss Joyce’s “house” – her beauty shop – and we are left the knowledge that one is never too young, or too old, or too…. anything…. to make a difference in our community.

We have another Arts in the Alley coming up in Greater Fulton Saturday April 14 and Sunday April 15 – will you join us? Click here for more info and to sign up!