Kids need something to do with their time, especially during the long days of summer. For a struggling neighborhood like Old South Baton Rouge, that need takes on stronger meaning.
When neighborhood residents met with the Arts Council and CPEX to discuss issues facing the community, crime and lack of opportunities for young people were top concerns. Separate from this planning work, the Mayor’s Office was already gearing up for a second go at its Summer Youth Employment Program, which aims to address part of that concern.
While students in this four-week program work all over the city, much of the action is centered on Old South Baton Rouge, and like many initiatives currently working there, it has a strong arts focus.
Kia Bickham, the mayor’s chief service officer, heads up the program, which saw its number of applicants increase from 323 students in 2013 to 562 this summer. They were able to accommodate 120 students this year, and the students split their time between developing community gardens—with the help of LSU and Southern University—and arts-based work with the Museum of Public Art.
Editor’s note: This story appeared in 225‘s November issue as part of a series of stories focusing on arts-based initiatives in Old South Baton Rouge. Read more here.
The museum’s director, Kevin Harris, linked the students with eight visiting national and international artists. Among other projects, they painted murals on blighted buildings.
“If you can’t tear the buildings down, we wanted to work with the owners to allow us to paint something beautiful and inspiring for the community,” Bickham says. “It gives these young people a chance to make that direct impact, in some cases within the communities that they live in.”
Bickham is a member of St. Francis Xavier Church on Myrtle Walk, near where many of the murals started taking shape in 2012. At the time, she was in the midst of planning the curriculum for the first year of the youth employment program, which is part of the Love Our Community initiative.
“That kind of triggered for me how you could take something that was blighted and make it into something beautiful, so that served as somewhat of an inspiration for [the program],” she says.
The students assisted the museum in painting nine murals from Old South Baton Rouge to North Baton Rouge this summer. They helped with about four murals in 2013. “Each artist talked to [the students] and worked with them on how they created the design and the colors and things like that,” Bickham says. “It was interesting how each one of [the artists] incorporated the creativity from the students back into the pieces.”
The artists, many of whom hadn’t worked with young people before, seemed to appreciate the experience as well, spreading the word about the program once they left Baton Rouge.
“To see how much they enjoyed [it] is something that makes us feel good, because from the city’s perspective, we are welcoming people into the city, exposing them to what we have here … allowing them to leave their mark, allowing them to share with others and to attract more visitors to our city,” Bickham says.
But for her, the biggest boon of the program is hearing from the students about how they would volunteer with the program even if they weren’t getting paid, and seeing how many reapplied from the first year and how engaged they were in the work.
“It’s encouraging youth to get involved in our communities to make a change … to understand what it means to take care of our communities and the small things you can do that go a long way to make a difference,” she says.
