Voice of the Youth Night...a success!!!

God is doing some great things in the Grove these days and one of them happened last Friday night (the 30th of Nov) when we held our first Voice of the Youth event. Just to give you a bit of background, one of the areas Urban Resurrection works through here in the the Grove is to create a space for people to have a voice that will be heard where they normally would not. It is also a place for people to share ideas and express themselves to each other and thus build the movement and momentum that will in turn create action and transformational change in our community. We call this a Voice Group. Our first Voice Group meeting happened in August and we have met pretty consistently every other week or so ever since. Out of these meetings it has come through that our neighbors have a real desire to see the youth of the community involved and having a voice as well. Due to the recent violence there was a more urgent desire to make this happen. SO the Voice Group decided that they and our Urban Resurrection team should create just such an opportunity for the youth ages 14 to 21. We all though that using the creative arts as a medium for this expression would be a good way to do it so we developed the Voice of the Youth Night. This was held at Rustic Treasures, a local coffee shop owned by Bona and Walt Parlins (Voice Group Members).  We had a church donate over $400 worth of art supplies that made it all work. So we advertised at the local youth hangouts and handed out fliers then prayed really hard that some youth would actually show up....

    Well, we were not disappointed because over 40 youth came through the event and many actually participated in the hip hop, drawing, graffiti wall, and open mic! We were thrilled to say the least and we even had ten youth sign up to be a part of the planning process for the next one!! So we plan to build on this event and hopefully it will grow into a full fledged part of our ministry. All of this aligns really well with our vision and we have decided to call the arts portion of our ministry BEATS which stands for Bringing Eternal Arts to the Streets.  Enjoy the pics!!!