A West Loop initiative is educating youth and adults in the arts and utilizing their talents to spread positive messages for the whole community to notice.
The “we all live here” organization encourages West Loop students and grownups to design artistic murals containing inspiring messages of inclusion to be posted on the empty walls of local schools, businesses and community spaces. Rich Alapack founded “we all live here” in 2015 once he began to believe there were too many detrimental society effects that only generated negative feelings or behaviors among residents.
An artist himself, Alapack was convinced that art would be a powerful tool in bringing generations of community residents together.
“In my mind, I was thinking that art has an ability to reach people sometimes when words or conversations fail," Alapack told West Loop News. “If [children] start to adopt this mindset at an early age, when they’ll get to be older they’ll already have a better baseline common denominator.”
When the organization first started, it was just Alapack with his message, a blog and signs promoting his ideology that he would persuade bystanders to hold with him. Five years later, “we all live here” has partnered with a total of 109 schools and with roughly 40,000 children participating so far.
“We all live here” operates through the group's ACT (Art, Community, Technology) Program when visiting schools. Alapack chose to emphasize using art, community and technology because he considers all three components to be “pillars of humanity” while also helping to keep children engaged for long periods of time.
The ACT Program is a five-step process that begins when each school collectively comes up with its own unique art project that lives by Alapack’s philosophy of inclusion. “We all live here” staff and volunteers then visit the schools to teach the children the values of inclusion and basic graphic design skills for about an hour in a school-wide assembly.
Students are then instructed to draw their school’s project logos as they are learning graphic design features that can either be completed during the assembly or in extra classroom time. “We all live here” collects the designs to use as inspiration for the official project that includes the school’s font and colors, among other details.
Finally, “we all live here” establishes a website the school uses to sell t-shirts and other products with their finished logo attached while also calling on project sponsors for the schools if necessary.
Some of the more notable murals include “Planet Earth” and “Hockey is for Everyone,” created in response to racist or spiteful graffiti.
“The main ingredient is making sure we are fostering a diverse, inclusive and positive environment for our youth and we’re remembering to appreciate the differences our neighbors bring to the table,” Alapack said. “If we live in a homogenous society, everything would be boring and bland. I think what’s weird makes us wonderful, and the more we remember that, the better off we’ll be in society.”
Alapack also collaborates with West Loop businesses to use the program as an alternative yet engaging strategy to unite employees together during company outings. Organizations design inclusion messages with chalk or paint that are found on empty brick spaces or hanging in their offices.
Alapack finds his method to be much more effective than standard inclusion-training seminars, where the messages do not get through to the employees if they do not believe it directly affects them.
“If you’re not open to the ideas, then you’re never going to receive the ideas,” Alapack said. “Through our approach, you have this hands-on active creation that there’s a lot of little guys running around. It gives you a chance to see how excited they are and be positively affected without someone telling you that you did something wrong.”
At first, Alapack found it difficult to transition into creating his own business, struggling to maintain his living situation after facing an income drop when first starting the program. After realizing the large impact he could make across the entire state, Alapack became motivated to perform even better every year.
“Even though I knew I was having a lot of positive impact, in my own life I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I should be doing this’ or ‘How much longer can I continue?’" Alapack said. "It started to turn a corner and now I think I’m not really focused on what we’ve achieved, I’m more focused on how much more there is still to do. One hundred and nine schools in just a few short years sounds like a lot, but there are 646 Chicago public schools, 4,000-plus schools in Illinois alone. Really, we’re just scratching the surface.”
“We all live here” is constantly searching for new schools to partner with and new pupils young and old to teach values of art and positivity.
“This whole program may seem like it’s hard to do but it’s not,” Alapack said. “We make everything custom-tailored to whatever our partners need, but that’s usually a brainstorm or two and moving toward a good cause. I think it’s something companies should not be afraid is going to be too much work or is going to disrupt their workday too much. It’s going to be a meeting or two and then we’ll be doing something amazing that everyone can benefit from.”
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