On Friday the “Amplifying Voices” mural project that our Resident Organizer Michelle Sayles planned and facilitated was featured on The Center for Community Change Housing Trust Fund Project Advocacy Skillshare blog:
How do you translate the collective hopes and visions of an array of community members so that they resonate with and influence decision makers in a city planning process? Faced with this challenge in Burlington, Vermont, Michelle Sayles, a Resident Organizer with the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition and an artist, and Jen Berger, an artist and community activist with a history of engagement on issues of homelessness, teamed up to paint a mural. The mural was presented in February as part of Plan BTV South End public input process to develop a plan for the future of Burlington’s South End neighborhood in late March. The “Amplifying Voices” mural depicts a vision for the South End derived from a series of one-to-one interviews, neighborhood surveys, and focus group conversations with current neighborhood residents living in affordable homes, including new American families and many of the same residents that Michelle works with through VAHC’s resident organizing program. “We wanted to make sure the concerns and aspirations of people living in the South End were part of the discussion as the City plans for the future of the South End,” said Sayles. “My experience working with residents living in the neighborhood is that we needed to provide them with a larger context about the potential impact of this process and we needed to be creative about how to engage them and seek their input.”
To read the full post, click here.
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