Black and Brown Solidarity | Planning

After three brainstorming sessions, the black and brown dreaming solidarity project has commenced. The youth worked on their creative projects with their respective groups this week. One group is working on videography, another on spoken word, and all the youth are recruiting for an art project where other youth in the neighborhood submit their art supporting black and brown solidarity.

We are still recruiting for our art project! Know any youth who would want to submit their art to be displayed at our convening on June 5th and paid $20 for their submission. Fill out this link to submit a piece.

Black and Brown Solidarity | Creative Dreaming Session 3

Last week, we held our last dreaming session for our black and brown creative projects. We are so happy with the turnout and involvement of our Proviso youth. In this session, we finalized topics for our creative projects and assigned managers. But before, we always start with dinner and a check-in. We had a great conversation about our favorite cultural foods with recommendations on foods/restaurants to try. Then we did a cultural connection on the usage of slurs in the youth community. Then, we started talking about our finalized project ideas. We will have three different projects all surrounding black and brown solidarity in the Proviso district. We cannot wait for you all to see them!

Next, week we will start working on our projects this week!

Black and Brown Solidarity | Creative Dreaming, Second Session

We hosted our second creative dreaming session last night on black and brown solidarity. After dinner, we opened up with reminders of our values on what creates a safe space. The youth then answered some of our reflection questions on black and brown communities, some of the biases we may have, and what we can learn from them. Then we continued building on ideas and topics we came up with last session. For inspiration, Maya showed the youth some of the past creative projects TFD has done. Each youth took one topic we came up with last time and brainstormed some creative projects that related to the topic. After, they shared their ideas and commented on others they found interesting.

Thank you so much to everyone who came yesterday! We are still looking for more youth who are passionate about black and brown solidarity. Contact Maya (maya@thefirehousedream.orga) for more information. Our last dreaming session is March 6th, 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM.

A Field Trip to Gente Fina

Photo Credit: Mariah

This last weekend, our mentees went on a field trip to Gente Fina, where they got the opportunity to ask the co-founders, Manny & Abraham, different questions about the creative field. They learned so many new things about creating a brand and what it takes to start. Niches, vendors, manufacturers, money, ideas, and networking were all mentioned throughout this dialogue. We cannot wait to partner with them again soon!

After we got back to the firehouse, Sandra, our Mentorship Coordinator, assisted our mentees in digitizing their work into Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a very long process to learn but in the end it is all worth it. It is an amazing skillset to have and we love having Sandra to be able to pass on her knowledge to our mentees about this amazing software.

Photo Credit: Mariah

A Trip To ReUse Depot

Don’t you just hate how building supplies get tossed into landfills? ReUse Depot prevents this from happening. We recently visited ReUse Depot once again for our mentees to practice their photography skills! It was amazing to see our mentees put all that they have learned about photography to use, as well as meeting the store cats! We also learned about Maywood’s original Firetruck. The Firetruck pictured above was a World War II Firetruck that was donated to Maywood. This means that at some point between 1943-1980’s this Firetruck was in our Firehouse! We love learning about the history of our community, especially about our Firehouse. We can’t wait to visit again!

Photo credit: @mariah_julianna_