Wayfinder Projects and the heart of the ART IN ACTION that supported the mural projects. What may look like murals was actually an outdoor community learning experience.
There is a perception of a social system of support that is supposed to improve people’s lives and it is through a top down government managed approach. …this works only in feeding that same government system. It is flawed, it takes the people out of the very economy of support to feed themselves as a stakeholder in this country. The people are not part of the economy or system strategy. And a perception of kingdom to serf, have and have nots, abounds. If politics become about feeding the system only, and the people rely only on the government, all loses balance and the confidence to sustain.
In these times government support is not freely given, leaving many rural people with a worst situational reality: the absence of the top-down protection and no grassroots resilience of the support community it took over.
I think strong government support and well-financed public services is vital and why we pay taxes. But this model is flawed. Project based partnerships is an immigrant and indigenous community connected model that needs to be bridged. Between government and people. An alliance of Municipal, Provincial, Federal and Citizen governments.
The best action is a politics of belonging based on strong and confident local communities….and keeping people and the skills of the people in the economy. Equally distributed to drop through many hands before it reaches sustainability.
A citizen project P6 approach.
The mural projects I was lucky enough to lead, gave me the honor of working with many indigenous and immigrant communities. For 25 years the murals were just the barn, the people and the connections to each other and the needed resources the song.
Today citizen building can look like that model. It was based on my entire resource town being forced relocated and continually hit by many tragedies that built a spine of resilience that was poured into my veins, like the coal dust that scared my knees.
See Murals but imagine there are welcoming alliances and committees for new arrivals to the street, connections of skills exchange outside spaces of our homes and institutions, public art and music events, community potluck meals, co-creating trade exchanges with senior and youth building scaffolding.
imagine there are programs to turn empty lots and roofs into community gardens, art alleys, metal scrap sculptures, city maintenance learning, and outdoor learning multi cultural centres.
There’s a farm school and a food gathering school (teaching urban animal husbandry), farming, horse stewardship, house building, garbage handling, street maintenance, sewing and quilting sessions.
Imagine places for freelance contract art workers to meet and collaborated for safe alleys. Digital literacy coffee shops with coding workshops.
Literacy projects through story telling for children and seniors, heritage collection and time spent through schools with elders and youth.
Imagine singing sessions and a games night in community hall. Local artists training people in the streets. There are street and rural film studios and street dances and tomato festivals, Sunflower planting along many communities and pie baking workshops.
Imagine tuition for spoken-word storytelling and history collection for immigrant and indigenous elders and seniors and a scheme for shutting streets to traffic so children and adults can play after on large art projects and parking lot painting.
Imagine a movements to train youth on site to create houses and build community from out of institutions. Imagine street nurses and a place to come home to for information to what systems are available to those not attached to the system. Not everyone has a doctor, is in school, or has family. Not everyone can afford a cell and not all communities are connected to the internet.
For decades rural people have leapt on the opportunities of the Mural Craze… but Wayfinder RURAL CREATES was the heart of all the mural projects that my teams led. A new, but from an old system, based on a project built by watching my people rebuilding a destroyed resource community.
This successful community project has been shared across the world, the foundation discovered a set of common community WAYIFNDER RURAL CREATES principles.
These projects demand commitment from local people, government and the community and the outsider community. Creating mini alliances..and a shared financial money and time cost.
The projects are close to people’s homes, open to everyone, and designed to attract and support talent rather than check lists and an agenda. is there a tourism and social legacy left? Yes. A physical and visible and socio infrastructure. that foster simple projects that immediately improve people’s lives.”
But it is the Wayfinder bridge that is the thread that ties. It ties us to our history and to our generations and to ourselves. AR:T In Community building to build a connected community bridge to the resources youth and elders need. A bridge to education, cultures, literacy, digital divide, rural-urban divide, while leaving legacy tourism projects.
Mural and Art events bridging bonds – along the highways that connect is all. Wayfinder Rural Creates model is that franchise. That can start from B.C. and influence the world, because it has for over 25 years and it looks like a trail of Murals.
ARTIST MICHELLE LOUGHERY 