Ryan Smith

Turning Point focuses on MS 219s core principles of community, academics, and athletics. The mural addresses the need for young people to develop educated minds and healthy bodies, and speaks to the need for the community’s investment in supporting its most important resource - its people.

As one of six projects created through Groundswell’s Summer Leadership Institute in 2007, young men in our Making His’tory program explored what it means to be an immigrant father in Brooklyn.

“Family Totems” was created by groups of students at The Urban Assembly School of Music and Art and their parents. The parents and children studied animal symbolism and imagery at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and then created an animal symbol, or totem, to represent their families.

Nonviolence was created in partnership with Inwood Houses Youth-for-R.E.A.L. afterschool program and the Community Change Institute. The students used a variety of media to grapple with a complex issue that directly impacts their community — violence.