Sanctuary on the Lawn at Caritas Village

A sculpture garden and memorial to the city’s homicide victims.

The project:

Every year, scores of Memphian are killed in our city, victims of homicide. Your donation will help us honor those victims, create a sanctified space for those who mourn their deaths and raise awareness of senseless violence that plagues our city.

The Memorial Sculpture Garden at Caritas Village will be the only memorial to our community’s homicide victims. The garden, depicted in the rendering above, will include a leaf-like sculpture as well as landscaping, outdoor seating and a wall bearing the victim’s names.

We want to thank all our supporters for your donations and encourage others to join this effort. Our goal is to bring the victim’s families, perpetrators and members of the Memphis community together to build and maintain this meditative space on the Caritas Village lawn. We plan to bring buckets of soil from neighborhoods throughout Memphis to the site as a symbol of our connectedness and the citywide nature of this memorial.

Caritas Annual Vigil:

Caritas Village is a safe haven, a community center, a coffee shop and culture arts center in the Binghamton neighborhood. Every year since 2006, Caritas Village has hosted an annual vigil and a series of prayer services that memorialize the city’s homicide victims — by calling out their names, their ages and the cause of these deaths. To mark each death, a simple wire sculpture tagged with the victim’s name was placed on the Caritas lawn. Our hope is to preserve this annual ritual by creating a dedicated space for solace and healing, and a permanent memorial to the victims.

Calling Community Members

As part of this effort, community leaders will be working to bring together the victims’ families, perpetrators, and friends and neighbors from throughout the city to create and maintain this garden — in what we hope will serve as both a healing process and an active protest.

About Caritas Village

Founded in 2006 by Onie Johns, Caritas Village is a safe haven in the Binghamton neighborhood whose mission is to break down walls of hostility between cultures, to build bridges of love and trust between rich and those made poor, and to provide a positive alternative to the street corners for the neighborhood children. Today, the Village includes a restaurant and offers a theater, art studio, free health clinic, after-school programs, tutoring and ESL programs.

Preservation Memphis (PM) is leading the fundraising effort for the Memorial Sculpture Garden at Caritas Village. PM is a group of individuals that undertakes small-scale preservation and construction projects to preserve our city’s landmarks and support Memphis communities. To contact PM, visit www.preservationmemphis.com.

Image of leaf sculpture

When a family member is killed, it’s as if a tree has lost a limb. We are commissioning a leaf sculpture by Tylur French of the Youngblood Studio in Memphis for the sculpture garden.

- Remove existing grass & provide for drainage
- Install 4' concrete winding walks
- Place large boulders, specimen trees, hardy plantings, and furnishings
- Create a covered outdoor eating space
- Fill in beds with crushed limestone for low-maintenance
- Create space for a proposed sculpture



 

For many years the Village has hosted a commemorative ceremony for the Memphis Martyrs, those who have been murdered in the prior year in our community.  This project will create a physical place of memory and gathering for friends and families, as well as for the neighborhood.  The project will also feature a bronze plaque with the names of each of the individuals lost during that year.  A new plaque will be placed on the building each year.

We hope to bring to attention the necessity of building love and trust, to advocate for justice through non-violent means and to provide support for the victims, their offenders, families and friends.