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The first step in developing public awareness about the importance of waterways, healthy native ecologies, and concepts like the Anthropocene is to facilitate deeper connection to the natural environment. Growing Notes, an ecological arts intervention supported by the SIU College of Arts and Media and the Field School of the Lower Mississippi River Hub, takes that first step by partnering with local community organizations to invite people of all ages to create personal nature journals. Participants begin with finding their homes on cell phone mapping apps and then use those images to think about and draw the natural environment as they experience it. These drawings become the first pages of a personal nature journal.
Center for Empowerment and Justice: Pianos at the Pavilion
The Center for Empowerment and Justice is a nonprofit in Carbondale, IL that provides resources to unhoused and low-income residents, including free access to art materials and space to work. Pianos at the Pavilion was a fundraiser for the CEJ that provided live music, community dialogue, and art, much of it made by formerly unhoused members of the community.A community leader spoke about how the CEJ had, over the years, supported his work with youth who were unhoused and/or struggling with drug addiction and a woman who had been formerly unhoused spoke movingly about the support she had received from the CEJ.
Women for Change: Garden Gala
The Garden Gala was a celebration of spring and community gardening that offered local residents plants and tips for how to grow them, free of charge. A delicious lunch of barbecued vegetables, many of them grown locally, was also served free of charge. It was held by Women for Change, a grassroots organization in Carbondale, IL.
growing notes, 2023
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