Kids Painting the Town!

Year: 2009
Country: El Salvador
Project Status: Funded
Impact Sector: Education
Project Investment: $499.07

Project Launch:

In El Salvador, politics is a very personal and divisive matter. The civil war of the 80s still looms largely in people's minds when they go to the polls. Therefore, elections here are extremely intense. They are not comparable really to elections in the US. Here, painting and postering is how the parties get the word out. Political parties stage big events and in places like my town, we saw the nearby bridge change party colors at least 2 times a week. Lots of money is spent on paint and posters and, lots of litter is created from the posters- people rip them down and then throw them on the ground.

The mayor of my town did not endorse even his own party painting, nor did he have posters made for his own campaign this year. Instead, he asked if we could have the kids paint the telephone posts with their artwork like a project I had told him that I participated in another town. As the former long-time school principal in our town, he sees it as not only a way for the kids to display their artistic talent but also a way to deter political parties from painting the town.

We would use the funds to have a paint project for the kids of the local school. We would invite groups of kids to sign-up to paint a post. On a given day, we would have a grand event where we would send all the kids out to their particular post and paint! We think this helps kids take pride in a prettier environment but also helps self-esteem by displaying and taking credit for their own artwork. Just painting as a way to show off the kids art work. Some of these project are very vague and original files don’t exist. All they did was make posters and put them up in the community in place of political posters that normally reside there

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