Youth Quilt is Almost Finished!

As you know from reading the paper, violence continues to infect inner-city Chicago neighborhoods. All too often, youth are the victims and perpetrators of violence. Over the summer, the teen youth program experimented with an interesting new group project to address this issue head on. One youth group at the Back of the Yards location worked on a quilt project. The concept behind the quilt project is to have the students celebrate their neighborhood while challenging them to push for change. Students were asked questions like "What would peace in your community look like?" and "If you could visually represent the best part of your community, what would that picture be?" Students drew a picture to represent their ideas and then turned the drawing into a fabric collage. Now the individual collages are being assembled into a large quilt... combining individual voices into a unified whole! We will post a picture of this wonderful creation on this blog when it is complete in early September.