Piece Description

This time on Peace Talks Radio, we explore a program that transforms troubled neighborhoods into more peaceful, secure places through art, learning, land transformation and economic development. Artist Lily Yeh is featured.  She's the co-founder of two non-profit organizations dedicated to
re-building communities: The Village of Arts and Humanities, Inc. and, more recently, Barefoot Artists, Inc.

In North Philadelphia, Yeh, with a group of neighborhood residents (mostly children), cleared a trash-strewn vacant lot and began to build an art park that incorporated mosaic sculptures, murals, and landscaping with trees and flowers. Over the next few years, Yeh's project was joined by artists, builders, educators and a growing number of community residents caught up in the vision of creating a more peaceful community. Yeh's ideas that helped bring the North Philadelphia neighborhood back to life are now being applied to projects in Rwanda, Kenya, Ecuador and China.

In Rwanda, her Rwanada Healing Project included the creation of a colorful memorial for one village's victims of the Rwandan genocide.  Host Carol Boss talks with both Lily Yeh and Brenda Toler, who raised her family in the North Philadelphia neighborhood where "Miss Lily's" efforts revived the community.

There is also a 29:00 version of this program at PRX: