Our plan
In March 2001, a group of lawyers and business people from the Bay Area came together with a single goal: to lower the 70% dropout rate among high school students in East Palo Alto. It was time, they decided, that the students of EPA were exposed to more than just inner-city violence -- it was time that they began to be inspired and empowered, just like the students across the 101 freeway in Palo Alto. The group settled on an art-based project — many of the founding members had an interest in the arts, or used the arts as an outlet to escape their day jobs — and the seeds for the East Palo Alto Mural Art Project were laid. The Mural Arts Project quickly blossomed into a rather large project — it was decided that East Palo Alto students would design and complete a mural for every school in the EPA school district. The project board members also decided that the Mural Project should not only empower students, offering them access to an arts outlet, but also help the students and their families financially. They raised money within the community and received donations from local companies, like Cisco Systems, Adobe, and Hewlett-Packard. Soon they had enough money to pay each participating student $9/hour for their work on the murals. Payment changed the project from an after-school arts program into life experience for the students, and allowed the students to help support their own families.
What we did
It didn't take long for the first 25 spots to fill up. For 14 weeks, students did research, designed and finally painted and installed their own murals in local schools. Throughout the process, students worked on both the artistic and organizational aspects of mural creation, allowing them to be responsible not only for the content of the mural but also for its completion.
Our results
The Since 2001, over 200 students have served the community creating murals for their local schools. The reaction from the community and the students involved has led the Mural Arts Project to expand their work — in the past few years, they've introduced a number of after-school courses, including a course on history that follows world events through the lens of art of the time, as well as a similar course that tracks major events of the 20th century by examining parallels in the history of hip hop. Students in the hip hop course have gone on to make their own albums, through an arrangement with Stanford University that offered students free studio time. The Mural Arts Project may have started in the hearts and minds of a few Bay Area lawyers and businessmen with the goal of keeping EPA students in school, but over the past seven years, the program has turned into something bigger: a source of pride in the community.
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