5/9/07

I went to two community meetings tonight; both had to do with my involvement in a new middle-school, after-school arts program that will begin this fall at Mound Elementary School in Slavic Village. The program, The Slavic Village Players, is simple: an after-school arts program, one afternoon a week for 12 weeks each semester. Each semester culminates in a performance for family, friends and the community.

The first meeting was at the Carnegie West Library in Ohio City for Neighborhood Connections, a program of the Cleveland Foundation. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the nuts and bolts of collecting the grant money awarded to us by the program, but the most interesting part of the meeting happened during the introductions. Each organization present introduced the name of their program, the neighborhood it will serve and the goals of the program. This meeting is one of many that Neighborhood Connections is having around Cleveland, yet I was amazed at the number and the creativity of the grassroots community programming represented.

There were many, many organizations who received funding for urban community gardens; I counted about ten groups at this meeting alone. I also learned about the Ben Franklin Community Garden in Old Brooklyn, which is a five acre garden that provides food for area hunger centers.

Community groups were also awarded funding to plant trees, to create walking groups and to provide arts and youth programs. Neighborhood Connections also funded a program that provides strollers to mothers who cannot afford them, a program to provide school supplies and book bags to indigent children and a program to fund a new African Dance group at Tri-C Metro. I left the meeting feeling fortunate to have shared a room with such a committed and motivated group of community-minded individuals.

The second meeting was at Slavic Village Development. The meeting was with Cleveland Public Art and ParkWorks to talk about the public art project pending for Cleveland's first rails-to-trails project on the Morgana Run Trail.

The Morgana Run Trail runs from East 49th and I-77 to the Mill Creek Falls off of Fleet Avenue. This trail connects Slavic Village to both the Garfield Reservation as well as the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail.

Architect Christopher Diehl, the new director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, part of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State, unveiled his visions for public art projects along the trail, an appropriate combination of urban-space and green-space. He spoke about not wanting to “add something, but to find something already there (along the trail) and charge it with more meaning and emphasis”.

Diehl's ideas include creating a pixelated mural on a long industrial building; converting a house adjacent to the trail head into a work of public art to be seen from I-77; and painting convenience stores and an abandoned building to mark the route when the trail converges with city streets for a couple of blocks.

His preliminary images were thought-provoking and left plenty of space for community involvement—that’s where The Slavic Village Players come in. We are looking for community arts projects in which the students could participate. The Morgana Run Trail is near Mound Elementary and being involved in this project could be an ideal fit for our program.

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