The Parkside Art Gallery will have a very special show starting on June 1.
“Our students have been working with the idea of giving back to our community and what we can do, what are we passionate about and how can we turn that into something positive,” said Amy Simcox, a Grade 7 teacher at the 100 Mile Elementary School.
The class have been working with local artists, such as Barb Brown, since the beginning of the school year to create art, which will be shown and then sold at Parkside.
“I think it will be cool to show people our art,” said Julia Siclari, one of the students.
The young budding artists have also been learning about United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The goals focus on equality, environmentalism and peace. The students must pick two of the goals and support it on a local level, which the art show at Parkside comes in.
All of the student’s creations’ proceeds will go to a charity they chose individually, except for pieces done by the class as a whole or in groups. In that case, the charity will be agreed upon by the class and/or groups.
Last summer, Simcox wrote a grant to get six I-Pads donated to the classroom. As part of it, she had to do some charity around the I-Pads.
“I’m very much into art and I know a lot of the students are so I tried to tailor it to what they would feel comfortable doing,” said Simcox, who wrote the proposal for the art show at Parkside Gallery last summer as well. “I hadn’t intended on combining the two until it morphed into that.”
The I-Pads have been used a lot by the students to research and develop the SDGs through videos and different apps.
Some of the students have already selected where the money from their art will be going and Simcox said they have seen the benefit and are feeling empowered by having their own choice in where the money goes.
Some of the charities students have already chosen are the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the South Cariboo Search and Rescue Society.
Ben Pickering, one of the students, chose the latter.
“It’s important to be able to go outside and not have to worry about getting lost or anything,” he explained.
Siclari is also choosing the Search and Rescue Society because they find people who are lost and help people outdoors.
The students are also working on an infographic that will go up in the gallery along with their art. It will detail in 13 to 15 seconds how the charity relates to the one or two SDGs they have chosen to represent.
