Community Walls

Creating community pride through artistic expression

Community Walls is an art curriculum designed to explore the concept of community and foster cultural understanding. We partner with local schools and community-based organizations to bring this program to youth in grades 5-12. Participating youth are challenged to explore and analyze community and culture from their own perspective.

The program runs for 8-10 weeks and consists of weekly one-hour sessions led by trained staff and held on-site at your location. We end the program with an artists' reception at one of our San Francisco hostels.

Participating youth explore their community through a series of activities, field trips, and art projects. The students then collaborate to create large-scale works of art that express a personal vision of their local community.

The youth artworks are installed at our San Francisco Downtown Hostel, located near Union Square, in order to give world travelers a youth perspective on life in the Bay Area.

In recent years, many local schools have been forced to reduce or eliminate funding for arts education. Through the Community Walls program, we hope to help bridge that gap, offering youth a unique form of personal expression that gives voice to their life experience.

"One of the most outstanding assets to my overall program was a number of youth (ages 7-13) who, before the Community Walls program, had no interest in the arts and are now participating and winning art shows, and constantly challenging themselves in a number of techniques and mediums. A lot of these youth had emotional and personal obstacles, and had problems working with others which the program helped them overcome. It was a creative and enriching way to introduce youth to art."
--Bill Mayfield, Art Director, Columbia Park Boys and Girls Club