Buzzing in Kingston 🌱
The Place Corps Kingston Fellowship is buzzing & blooming all around Kingston 🌱 The fellows have been busy diving into creative projects and deepening their ties within the Kingston community.
We joined KAN Landscape at the Kingston City Hall to present the public proposal for the Green Space on Broadway & Prince Street. The fellows have been working diligently this year on solidifying ideas for the space to encourage community engagement and benefit the Kingston community. Our fellows, alongside students from the YMCA Farm Project, shared their experience of supporting this project and their learning regarding landscape design in public space. We are so proud to have been a part of this project, and immensely grateful to Live Well Kingston, KAN Landscape, Trust Hub, and the City of Kingston for including us in this amazing group of change-makers in our community.
In our workshop series “Access Kingston” led by our lead educator, Mark Ressl and his partner Sage Jobsis, our fellows have also been examining our city through the lens of accessibility. We discovered many spots in our Kingston community that have prioritized accessibility, but there is still work to be done! Our Fellows are putting their design+build skills to good work by creating and installing accessibility ramps throughout Kingston, with the goal of making our city a more accessible, equitable place!
We have also been exploring self expression & visual storytelling in our Self-Portraiture series. We are thinking about interpretations of self in photography through examining the rich history of artist traditions in self-portraiture and articulating our own artistic visions for self portraiture… aka Selfie vs. Self-Portrait! This series has opened up conversations about our personal understanding of self expression, options for autonomy in visual storytelling, and how we can better know ourselves through creative explorations!
AND, last but not least, we went on a big springtime adventure to Mystic Seaport & Aquarium! Our Kingston Fellows experienced many "first's" on this trip, including--sailing solo, seeing Beluga whales, eating banana pancake ice cream, & sleeping under a planetarium sky of stars, :) Visiting a new place and experiencing new things opens the world's wide doors to us, and encourages us to remember our greater home is the earth. It prompts us to think about our sense of belonging in spaces outside of Kingston, how even if a place looks different from our home, we all belong and all have a responsibility to care for our places & one another with kindness, compassion, and care.