Woodland youth beautify community, reduce graffiti through art

by Lamar Heystek
Coordinator, Woodland Coalition for Youth

The Woodland Coalition for Youth, in partnership with the UC Davis Chicano Studies Department, is beautifying the Woodland community through art.

Thanks to a successful REACH Program Improvement grant application written by Carlos Francisco Jackson, the director of the Chicano Studies Center for Art and Culture, Woodland teenagers have been working with artist Maceo Montoya to paint murals on walls that have been defaced by graffiti. One of those walls is a concrete partition that runs between the Yolo Family Resource Center on Lincoln Avenue and the Carlton Club, a membership establishment on Elm Street.

Montoya and nearly a dozen members of the Woodland Youth Council, a group of young people working with adults in the Woodland Coalition for Youth to create community change, painted a mural that features various scenes from Woodland’s past, as well as depictions of the area’s earlier residents, including the Patwin Native Americans and settlers William Gordon and Frank S. Freeman.

The wall behind our office had been the target of weekly tagging incidents. Now, with the presence of a mural, passersby admire and respect the wall. No one has defaced it. It makes a real difference to the people who work and live here. Members of the Carlton Club had been excited by the preliminary sketches presented to them and had been looking forward to having an aesthetically pleasing graffiti deterrent placed on their wall, which had to be painted over frequently. The one thing they asked to be included in the mural was a tractor, and the artists were pleased to paint one.

Working with the youth, Montoya applied for a permit from the city of Woodland to paint a much larger mural on the side of the Taqueria Guadalajara, on the corner of West and Court streets. The Planning Commission unanimously granted the permit last month, praising the subject, color scheme and graffiti-abating properties of the new mural.

One of the goals of the Woodland Coalition for Youth is to provide opportunities for increasing meaningful relationships with adults. It has been shown that adults mentoring youth helps to keep kids out of trouble and allows them to be leaders in the community alongside their older counterparts. The murals thus far have entailed more than 100 project hours of planning and painting. If Montoya works with an average of five youth per hour, he will have participated in more than 500 cumulative hours of meaningful youth-adult interaction when all is said and done. That is pretty significant.

Jesús Ramos, a Pioneer High School 10th-grader and president of the Woodland Youth Council, is one of those youth.

“It’s fun and it feels good to help out the community,” said Ramos.

The Yolo Family Resource Center, a Woodland-based nonprofit organization providing case management and counseling services to local families, is one of nine agencies in the region administering a three-year, $600,000 Community Action grant from Sierra Health Foundation through its REACH youth program to establish local youth coalitions.

As a REACH Community Action coalition, the Woodland Coalition for Youth is making communitywide changes for youth to ensure they are safe and healthy, have positive relationships with caring adults, have meaningful opportunities to participate in the community and develop the skills they need to be successful. The coalition facilitates these changes through the creation and coordination of a youth leadership center, mentoring programs, policy development, service learning and other youth-led opportunities. Visit the Woodland Coalition for Youth Web site.