I had the best time at the Heidelberg Project in Detroit. I am working on a project right now that is nothing short of frickin' cool! Provo Craft, through their new site and program Cricut Classroom, have done something amazing and well, because I can't go into details, I cannot share it all....yet..... just know that it is going to change lives and bring art to children- enough said there in my book.
Heidelberg is one of those amazing places- especially for us "altered art- ephemera junkies". Tyree Guyton and his family basically took blighted buildings and made them works of art. Many folks drive by and don't quite know what to make out of the Project. Some consider it junk and a public eye sore, some don't care either way and, others think it is a wonderful inspiration of what one person can do to make a difference in their immediate community..... I fall into this last camp. Heidelberg is doing some incredible things!
We live in a disposable culture, things are flippantly throw away and fill our streets and landfills with junk. Some figures state that a full 80% of what we throw away could have been reused in some way..... can you imagine?
You know, our disposable mentality doesn't just apply to "things", it also applies to people. I hate to even write it but, it is true. How many times have you ridden down a street, and missed the homeless person there under the pile of newspapers? (maybe you didn't miss them, you avoided them and made sure not to look them in the eye) How many times have you gone out to eat and dropped $100 on a meal you didn't even finish while folks in our own backyard here in the United States (not some third world country we all think of when we hear "starving children") are going hungry? What about all those kids "loitering" at the mall....think really hard about what your initial thoughts about them were.... drop-outs, convicts, unwed mothers, rude, foul mouthed, misguided, unambitious and disrespectful.....not doctors, lawyers, inventors of the cure for cancer, teachers...., you get my drift. It isn't about poverty or even the lack of resources, it is about perception. We as a society have written these folks off and labeled them disposable, not worth anything, not worth the investment of time. I say time because, just throwing money societal problems and hoping they will magically go away does nothing but line pockets of folks who know the rest of the world isn't paying attention. It is about investing your time and equipping folks to do amazing things and BELIEVING they can do it in the first place. I think we sometimes throw money at things out of a guilty conscious not because we believe it could actually work. If you really want to know how important something is to someone, find out not where they spend their money but, where they spend their time. If someone spends a lot of their personal time on something, their money is invested in it as well.
I wonder what the world would look like if we stopped looking at the "cast-offs" as landfill waste, what it would look like if we were to actually think about what we are throwing away in a new light and taking the time to see new uses for those things...... I wonder? Heidelberg believes in equipping children with a sense of hope and vision and, for some of these kids, it the very first time they have ever heard that someone thinks they are important and what they have to say is important.
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