Healing Arts & Education Village

The Healing Arts & Education Village is an intergenerational arts and skills education project. In partnership with Imagine Englewood If, our project will help to transform a 10,000 square-foot, three-story building into a healing arts space that cares for community and helps community care for itself. This effort subsidizes creative workshops and programs for the Englewood community and provides a multi-layered platform for instruction, interaction and inter-generational collaboration. Our work will foster creative arts engagement and instruction; anchor wellness education for young aspiring entrepreneurs; and facilitate the dissemination of communal and indigenous knowledge.

This program runs from Monday-Thursday (10am-4pm) with site-based learning on Fridays. Workshops are community-centered, intergenerational and led by community. There will be a collective beginning and end to the day. There is also a focus on intergenerational and residential collaboration. Participants will learn about personal wellness, build solar panels, and practice African mantu arts.

Our program began Monday, June 27th!

We already have the space reserved for the summer and are ready to get started. Our goal is to raise resources and collect recycled tools and materials so we can provide the teaching and learning that we envision. We will also send out message of gratitude and bi-weekly notices so people can see how their money is being spent.

Englewood has at least 13,500 young people between the age of 16-24. At 18.1% of the total Englewood population, this is the largest sized age-range of any age-range in Chicago. It is also higher than Chicago’s average of 15.1% for the 16-24 age-range (2010 U.S. Census).

As a not-for-profit organization focused on land and cultural preservation, we are creating a year-round education program that can teach cooperative economics, personal wellness and more.

Today, Chicago's greater Englewood community is plagued with some of the city's highest reported rates of unemployment, violent crime, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy and school dropout. Over the past several years alone, this primarily African American neighborhood has seen hundreds of homicides with victims of all ages, even as early as infancy. Currently nearly 43% of Englewood residents live below the poverty line, with the average household income being only $11,993, and the unemployment rate among adults in the area remains at 23%. Continually finding oneself surrounded by violence, drug abuse and poverty such as this can have a damaging effect on the resiliency of those impacted, particularly children and youth. Research has shown that the more trauma a young person experiences in their lives (as seen with Imagine Englewood Ifs primary service population), the more likely they are to face the following issues in adulthood. Factors such as these not only pose a future risk to the health and livelihood of youth and adults. This is why ongoing, accessible and affordable educational programs are essential.