05/15/2011
Chula Vista Community Arts Group's first project initiated with an invitation from a chair of the North Park Festival of Arts. CVCAG was asked to provide a free children's art activity for the Kids Art Block. At that time the group had no funds so we had to work with limited resources. I contacted several potential sponsors and Serena from the Lake Shore Learning Store was very supportive and immediately said yes to the project. Lake Shore Learning Store generously donated 4 gallons of paint, several containers of glitter and glue. I was happily surprised that we got a sponsor especially because at that time we did not have non-profit status. Thank you Lake Shore Learning Store!!!!
My initial idea was to use as many recycled materials and create a walk in cardboard structure that the kids could decorate. Home Depot in Eastlake was very helpful and not only did they donate ALL the cardboard for the structure but they helped us load it into the car. This project looks very simple but it was very labor intensive just loading up the cardboard and supplies and building the structure took a lot of effort. I am very grateful to all our volunteers from the local high school: Alanna, Janelle, Chelsey, Rose, Taylor, etc.
At 7 am on Sunday the volunteers gathered to start putting up the structure.
CVCAG did not even have funds for a sign so we made our own with cardboard and collage the front cover. Our goal was to use as little new materials as possible and I feel we achieved our goal!
While I was researching online potential designs for the project I came across a structure that had holes cut out so that kids could stick their head out and take pictures. I decided to incorporate this into the design and eventually it became more of an interactive structure in which the kids could play in. Some of the volunteers worked all Saturday to paint a cat so that the kids could take pictures and decorated the structure.
As soon as we had put the structure together parents and kids had already started to arrive and participate. What I liked most about this project is that it encouraged parents to participate and get creative with their children. Kids got to have fun and make a mess. The project was multi media and included paint, coloring with crayons or markers, collage, glitter and stamp the walls.
We started with blank walls!
By mid day kids had already covered most of the walls.
All ages were included and participated together.
We also had the outside of the structure to decorate and CVCAG volunteers spent most of the day making a collage on one of the sides.
The only hard part for parents was getting the kids to leave.
Most parents were ok with the messy project and encouraged their kids to go all out and be creative. All the parents congratulated and thanked CVCAG for providing such a fun project. I was very happy that this project made so many kids happy and cost very little money and used mostly recycled materials. I feel that for our first project we were very successful and achieved our goal of providing a fun, inexpensive, creative and environment friendly project.
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