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BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Part of the Baton Rouge community is memorializing fallen community activist Sadie Roberts-Joseph. One of the latest project for the Walls Project is a tribute mural for Roberts-Joseph, who was found dead in the trunk of her car in July while Hurricane Barry was approaching the Louisiana coastline. SEE ALSO: Massive crochet mural fills exterior wall of future Arts Council of Baton Rouge She was the founder of the Odell S. Williams African-American Museum, and had organized the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration. Baton Rouge artist Kristen Downing designed and painted the mural on July 20 during the organization’s ReactivateBR day of service, a quarterly cleanup day along Plank Road. The mural, located at Pawnee Street and Plank Road, depicts Roberts-Joseph surrounded by hands holding uplifting messages that read “Art Lives Forever” and “Speak.” Build Baton Rouge, formerly known as the East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority, sponsored the project. SEE ALSO: The Old South Wall by the BR Walls Project “The impact of Sadie Roberts-Joseph to our family, our community and our nation was truly a hidden jewel. We knew what Aunt Sadie stood for in our family and the impact she had on our community, but to learn that her work had reached communities globally, was phenomenal! This has inspired me to press on even more; to let the work I’ve done speak for me as well," CADAV & Walls Project - Community Outreach Director Pat McCallister-LeDuff said in a prepared statement. The Walls Project is a nonprofit that hopes to bridge the gap between the artistic and business communities in order to beautify the city and encourage economic development. Read the full article here.

Walls Project September 2019 Newsletter

Southern University Lab School senior Robert Harris shot his second paid photography gig last week. A Baton Rouge art gallery hired Harris to document an event, including the artwork, guests and speakers. Before this year, Harris had never seriously picked up a camera. Harris is trying to make the most of the opportunities afforded him as a student in a program called the Futures Fund. It’s a Baton Rouge initiative that aims to connect students in underserved areas with arts and technology professionals to teach them skills that will enable them to work toward a career in those fields. Futures Fund showed off its students’ photography and software projects at its first showcase event Saturday, displaying the intersection of skills, creativity and professionalism the project emphasizes. The program offers weekly workshops in photography and software coding at the Southern Lab School. Students build applications, explore the campus for photo ops and discuss how the disciplines they’re learning can help them day to day and in the future. Casey Phillips, the program’s director, said the initiative differs from similar programs because it pushes its students to understand that the skills they are learning can lead to a lucrative career. Since the program began, he said, it has drawn support from a number of large IT companies desperate to increase their potential workforce. “The people in digital design and marketing, they can’t find people to fill jobs,” Phillips said. “People don’t realize, there are $68,000 to $100,000 jobs just sitting, left unfilled.” Bennet Rhodes, a Baton Rouge videographer who volunteers as a photography instructor for the Futures Fund, helped Harris connect with the Foyer, the art gallery the student worked at last week. Aside from photography techniques, Rhodes said, he tries to share what he has learned over years of being in business for himself. “Things like showing up on time, answering your emails. Small things, but if you don’t do them, people aren’t going to hire you,” Rhodes said. “We’re probably teaching things here that a lot of professional photographers don’t always do. But if the program only taught the skills to get by in an office, it would have trouble keeping students interested. Czarina Walker, an instructor in the software coding program, said allowing students to create projects they complete during the class gives them a sense of accomplishment. In each class, she said, each student works around a theme, whether it’s trying to solve a specific problem or working with a certain programming language, in order to create something that is personal to them. The tools they use allow them to easily share their work with their friends and families, who can access their pages online or download student-created apps to their smartphones. “It makes them feel so good to be able to share these things they’ve created,” Walker said. In one class, Walker led the class in searching through Baton Rouge’s Open Data Portal, a city website that allows citizens to access city records and statistics on topics ranging from crime to public parks. She said using the portal allowed students to bring what they had learned about software close to home and showed them how that software could help them learn about their city. When Walker asked the students to name something they thought they would find in the data, several said they expected to see a large number of car crashes on rainy days. After Walker taught them how to “query” the data for specific information, they found the majority of wrecks in the city happen while the sun is shining. Asked to explain, some students guessed that roads were busier and people drove less carefully when the weather is nice. “It was like watching the scientific method in action,” Walker said. Harris, the photography student, never meant to enroll with the Futures Fund but now finds himself hooked, both on photography and the learning process. He was giving his friend a ride to a class when he sat in on his first session, and an instructor’s words clicked into place for him. “He was talking about going out and seeing the beauty in everything, even rocks and dirt,” Harris said. “And I went outside and looked around and I was just, like, amazed.” Read the full article, here.

How many teenagers are willing to get up at 8 a.m. on Saturday? Granted, these young adults are provided a free meal when they arrive but I don’t think that’s enough to make them give up a day to sleep in. It’s because Casey Phillips, director of The Walls Project, doesn’t just offer a free meal. He offers Futures Fund, a program that focuses on preparing youth for their future. The Walls Project creates public art installations but has different parts to its cultural redevelopment and reactivation plan, not just painting murals. The art program consists of programs like Murals — where artists paint murals collectively with the community — and #10WordStoriesBR — where residents submit ten-word poems to be displayed in mural form throughout the city. The Futures Fund program is a part of the educational portion. It creates digital, literary, visual, and performing art opportunities for the youth. It is expanding into Southern’s Business School and just launched this year in at BRCC Midcity. Phillips also said The Futures Fund goal by 2020 is to train “a thousand 12 to 18-year-olds in coding, another thousand in photography and literary arts, and another thousand in arts and music management as well as live recorded sounds.” Phillips said that the program also teaches soft professional skills like how to interview. The Walls Project began as a grassroots project in 2012 but Phillips knew he’d take his small project and turn it into something bigger, when he decided to include the youth in the game plan. Phillips said that working with kids wasn’t his intention but that quickly changed. “… By the third or fourth mural we had like 350 people show up to Community Paint Day on a really hot summer morning at 6:30, 7 o’clock in the morning and half of those were kids,” Phillips said. “It occurred to me that what we were doing meant more to kids than necessarily the adults. The more we started engaging young people, we saw it –Nobody is talking to these kids, especially young black men from 12-18.” Phillips said that when he showed up in the neighborhoods people would look at him funny and watched what he was doing but eventually they’d reach out about signing up a young adult to help paint a mural. The Walls Project partners with the Mayor’s office and allows companies to come in and hire the students. To name a few – Big Buddy, Starbucks, BRCC foundation, Southern lab foundation, and parts of the Industrial section have all reached out about being interested in some of The Walls Project’s students. Students can take classes in spring, fall and summer. The program sees 350 students per year, Phillips said. Classes are held on Saturdays 8 a.m. to noon for 8 weeks with one enrichment day where specialized workshops can be chosen. During the 10th week is the district showcase. The district showcase allows students to demonstrate what they’ve learned throughout the 8-week program to companies and joint organizations. The Futures Fund is free for children who qualify as middle too little income. As for the future of The Walls Project, Phillips said he hopes to grow more in north and Midcity Baton Rouge. “I’m interested in expanding statewide but in all actuality we have so much work to do here,” he said. “I don’t want to go wider, I want to go deeper.” (Pictured above (from left to right): The Futures Fund program manager, Luke St. John McKnight and The Walls Project director, Casey Phillips) Read the full article, here.

The Walls Project is transforming Baton Rouge, inside and out. Even those who have not heard of The Walls Project are likely to be familiar with some of the organization’s work. It’s responsible for the frequently Instagrammed mural on the side of the former Harrington’s Cafe with brightly colored triangles and butterflies, along with dozens of other murals scattered across the city. What began as a Kickstarter to build the first mural in 2012 has evolved not only into a full-scale public arts campaign over the years, but also a successful community outreach organization. Through its 3-year-old program, The Futures Fund, The Walls Project offers coding and photography classes for middle and high school students to help them get a head start on skills in demand in today’s workforce. While The Futures Fund is open to all students, the program is geared toward lower-income children. By implementing needs-based tuition, The Walls Project ensures these classes are available to any student interesting in taking them. Classes take place Saturday mornings at Baton Rouge Community College and Southern University, but will eventually expand to LSU. While the program currently has around 300 students enrolled, The Futures Fund is not always the first program associated with The Walls Project since its results aren’t as tangible as brightly painted walls. Marketing director Helena Williams wants to change that. She first became involved with The Walls Project as a volunteer, painting fences at BREC’s Gayosa Street Park. A Baton Rouge native, Williams moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 14. She moved back to the Capital City six years later with a broader perspective on the nature of a city, she said. “One of the things I became aware of was the difference in a real metropolitan city and how Baton Rouge should be and how it’s not,” Williams said. “I’ve always been a big proponent of if you want there to be change, it’s better to do it yourself than to wait and hope for someone to do it.” Williams funneled this energy for driving change into her hometown, working hours upon hours weekly for The Walls Project. Volunteerism turned into a contract doing graphic design work for the company, which turned into a full-time job as the marketing director — one of the organization’s three permanent positions. The organization’s renewed focus on The Future Fund has resulted in the materialization of a new set of goals for the organization: First, The Walls Project creates murals and other public art, then cultivates youth in the community and teaches them creative, practical skills applicable to the workforce and in return, these children grow up to reactivate the community by strengthening Baton Rouge’s economy. The Futures Fund offers more experienced students the opportunity to further hone their skills through paid work-study programs. “We try to instill in them a kind of entrepreneurial mission in themselves,” Williams said. “We’re hoping that with all these skills that there’s going to be an economic boom here.” Although the project is still relatively new and most of its participants are still minors, Williams has already seen participants in these programs contributing to their communities. One 17-year-old started his own business while another has an internship coding for the mayor. Currently, The Walls Project team is preparing for its fourth annual MLK Day Festival of Service, a large scale event spanning 20 blocks — between Airline Highway and Swan Ave. — where thousands of volunteers will pick up trash, paint murals, plant an urban forest and fix peeling paint around the city. The event will be on Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend — Jan. 12-15. Read the full article, here.

BATON ROUGE - Worn-out tires fill neighborhoods in the capital region, creating eyesores. The parish has been working on ways to remove them in its fight against blight. One man has a unique solution: turn the trash into art. Taliesin Gilkes-Bower traveled from California to transform an empty lot at the intersection of Winbourne Ave. and Barlette St. into a pathway lined in tires. The artist partnered with The Walls Project, which aims to clean-up and beautify the city. “I've created a meditation labyrinth, it’s based on the labyrinths that show up in Cathedrals in Europe,” said Gilkes-Bower. The artist took the project one step further, planting flowers, food and herbs inside the tires. “It’s pretty wonderful to take what usually is an eyesore and transform it into materials for a garden,” said Gilkes-Bower. All of the tires used were dumped in nearby neighborhoods. It only took two days for the artist and a group of volunteers to collect more than 300 of them. “A lot of times they just get put in abandoned lots and dead end streets,” said Gilkes-Bower. Abandoned tires can sometimes create a hub for mosquitoes, so the Metro Council has agreed to buy a tire shredder to get rid of them. But until then, Gilkes-Bower has found an alternative solution. “I'm in support of any sort of transformation that takes something that feels like trash and makes it into a meaningful material with value,” he said. Read the full article here.

Walls Project Newsletter July 2019 - Review

Walls Project June 2019 Newsletter

The Futures Fund opens its doors to another semester of teaching the next great photographers and coders of the capital city. On September 8th, The Futures Fund will see new and returning faces enter their classrooms to be trained for skills that can change their future career paths. Baton Rouge students, between sixth and twelfth grade are able to enter the program and become trained in photography or coding over the course of ten Saturdays. Each class of either a digital or visual arts discipline, begins as early morning workshops lead by some of Baton Rouge’s highest-ranked industry professionals. These teachers not only pass the skills they’ve learned throughout their careers, additionally they become mentors to students looking to expand their trajectories. In its third year, The Futures Fund already sees students moving the needle on their own. Coding instructor, Quinton Jason, states, “Since the group was together last semester, they came in ready to roll. Some of them already do freelance and brought their freelance questions to the start of class.” This sense of entrepreneurism is sparked and encouraged throughout the classes. Every skill taught is meant to empower young minds into pursuing their passions. The Futures Fund program manager, Taylor S. Hunter, passionately describes the growing impact of the classes, “Every Saturday morning, [our] mission is to educate, enrich and empower the young minds that soon will be leading our neighborhoods, cities and state for years to come.”

While most teens like to spend their summer break relaxing, ten highly motivated high school students from the 70805 area will spend their summer learning community stewardship and healthy eating through agriculture training. In partnership with Mayor-President Broome’s Youth Workforce Experience, Baton Roots Community Farm at Howell Park will employ these teens to spend their summer weeks planting rows of local vegetables and fruit, harvesting the produce to be distributed locally, and helping seniors with their garden beds at the Harmony Intergenerational Gardens. Through the Hustle and Grow program, students called “trainees” are introduced to the connection of agriculture and technology, learning how small community farms can be efficiently run in urban settings, allowing for the community to participate in the process. Program coordinator Mitchell Provensal comment, “By getting youth involved in this community farm we can improve local options for accessing fresh food while developing young leaders in our community.” After the summer pilot of the program is initiated, Hustle and Grow plans to recur every Saturday throughout the Fall and Spring semesters. “In our climate, we are able to grow fresh vegetables year round, which gives us the opportunity to consistently be able to offer programming and fresh food for our community,” Mitchell explains. To find out more, visit Baton Root’s Facebook page.

Walls Project Newsletter May 2019