Facilitation & Workshop, Brand Strategy
Mural Arts Program
Open Workshop: Community Engagement
Overview
Our team at P’unk Ave was invited by the Mural Arts Program to find ways to support artists in their community-engagement practice, a core component of the work they engage artists to do to benefit their communities.
During our preliminary discovery work, we recognized there was a tremendous wealth of expertise, knowledge and experiences already within in the artist community, with no way to share it. Since Mural Arts doesn’t have a central physical space for their artists to gather—or other intentional ways for skill or knowledge sharing to happen—their artist community rarely had opportunities to overlap and learn from each other.
I designed and facilitated two half-day workshops called Open Workshop: Community Engagement, which consisted of individual and group exercises focused on harnessing the existing skills and knowledge around community engagement in the room.
Attendees had the opportunity to reflect and share their own approach to community engagement, as well as learn tools, tips and tricks to leave with new skills and actionable next steps or ideas for continuing to evolve their own practice and approach.
Following the Open Workshop, we provided a recommendations document for the Mural Arts Program team, informed by our learnings in our discovery research and findings from the Open Workshop.
Recognizing the capacity of the organization and the amount of time that would need to go into each of them, we broke our recommendations into short, medium and long term commitments. Recognizing it’s extremely difficult to see real change internally without full commitment from the team, each recommendation provided guidance for taking the next step within the organization.
