The joyful, beautiful and meaningful art from our contest is up on the wall of our Artward! Kids Studio in the big community room of the "club house" and it looks awesome!
It was actually a difficult work to decide on the award winners with so many fabulous works. Yet the winners each display a unique and unmistakable talent. Because of the level of submitted works to our initially announced three awards of $50 Amazon gift cards we decided to add two Honorable Mention awards with a $25 Amazon gift card each.
If the enthusiastic response to our new program, the quality and amount of submitted works and the feed back from a community we are receiving were not enough we just got another great news. Upon learning what we are doing our great long-time collaborator on the Love My Neighbor program, the City of Carson came up with the awesome offer. Council Member Cedric Hicks came up with a great idea for the city to issue the certificates of appreciation for the winners of our contest. He further generously offered to present them in person on behalf of the City Council. He was quickly joined by Mayor Pro Tem Jim Dear offering to come as well.
This is why we, in Artward Initiative, firmly believe in collaborations and partnerships. Problems like "Scottsdale" cannot be tackled successfully by any one alone. It can only be done together. Even though the City of Carson was depleted by the crisis and was not able to support the Love My Neighbor project in "Scottsdale" the way it did for five years with their cultural arts grant program, which was eliminated all together for 2021, they still found a meaningful way to show their support for this long-suffering community.
Now we can't wait for the ceremony. It will be meaningful for many reasons as one of the first live events of our cautious re-opening.
