Youth Venture

September 17, 2007 - 9:40am — sassafras

Our office building is smokin'! (check out our new mural and paint job!)

Seriously, check out the pictures in the Images section.

I feel like a Venturer!! When I (Kelly) came to the office in February, it was immediately apparent that the outside of our building needed A LOT of help. We're located right next to one of the coolest places in town- Intermedia Arts- and one of the only places in Minneapolis that people can legally paint and tag. Amazing art goes up on the wall every day...but an amazing amount of quickly scrawled tags was going up on our building as a result. Not to mention that the building hadn't been painted since maybe 1842 (okay, so perhaps I exaggerate).

Anyway, I'd recently met one of the newest B-girls in town and I talked to her about getting the outside of our office painted. She was down (thank you Shiva!), but we had a TON of work to do. It would be four months before our office was painted.

First, our office wrote a grant to a local paint company in town, Valspar Paint (thank you Valspar!). They were kind enough to donate 14 gallons of bucket paint and a huge discount on spray paint. Writing the grant took only a few weeks, but waiting and negotiations about the spray paint took several more. In the meantime, Ashley (Shiva) and I talked to friends about painting the building. It was easy to find volunteers to just roll-out paint (ask your friends! promise them food!), but finding artists that were willing to work for free was HARD. At one point, I had talked a friend into volunteering with his whole crew, only to have him completely disappear the week before we were supposed to paint.

FINALLY, the day of the painting. I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off! I thought I would have time to paint myself, but in reality I was busy fetching everything under the sun for my volunteers- water, paint, ladders, you name it. I became an accomplished eavesdropper so I could anticipate when the painters needed something or when they needed encouragement about their work. And in the end, the core painters and I dropped in on our office for over a week to make finishing touches to the design.

AND IT WAS COMPLETELY WORTH IT! WOO-HOO! People stop by the office just to check us out! They lean out of their cars! I've gotten personal thank you's from people that live and work in the neighborhood! No one has tagged us (yet! cross your fingers) since, AND Shiva is thinking of filling out an Action Plan to join the Venturer ranks and offer her skills to other businesses with graffiti tagging issues :)

Thanks everybody that helped paint! Hugs for all!