The team of Jody Guy of the Center for Civic Arts, Shamus Fatzinger, videographer, and Akil Esoon, musician, created the video on the GoFundMe page:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/6mvjck-mulberry
The video, though less than four minutes, conveys the challenges and the hopes of the Mulberry Project in an imaginative and evocative way.
Narration:
This special place started out not so much as a church but as a congregation. It's a fine distinction, isn't it? First we gather, then we focus. We have a long way to go to make this place a kind of modern non-religious congregation. Its days as a full-tine house of worship have long past. As the inventory of empty churches in Western Pennsylvania continues to pile up, this one is definitely in that category.Hello, my name is Jody Guy and I am the director of Center for Civic Arts. We are a nonprofit. Center for Civic Arts now controls this magnificent specimen where two thousand once congregated during its peak in the 1950s and 60s.
When I was growing up, Wilkinsburg was a thriving middle class borough just outside of Pittsburgh PA. There’s a cornerstone laid November 25th, 1928, and there’s a box inside that contains school records, a list of the entire membership of the class of 100 men and their class photos of 132 students. Now Wilkinsburg is challenged by closing schools and businesses, a stockpile of abandoned properties, and a dwindling property tax base. Wilkinsburg is a community in distress but the history of this place is extraordinary right along with the people that live here.
The last time I attended a church service at Mulberry was 1990. I was with my 94-year-old grandmother Mary Margaret Peterson and we were on one of our Sunday morning walks. We sat in one of the rear pews underneath the balcony and there were only about 20 people attending that day.
The power of community working together is infinite. This is our simple goal: meaningful transformation and meaningful impact. Center for Civic Arts wants to leverage this beautiful space into a vital community center that will serve the interests of everyone. Programs will include out of school, after-school programs, community kitchens, manufactuing, artists’ residencies and performing arts and other businesses that would also benefit from this place and the people that live here.
There’s a lot of work to do here but we have a team of dedicated visionaries keenly focused on bringing this incredible asset back to life and we’re going to to do it in stages beginning with securing the roof and the windows to prevent further erosion of the property and that's where you come in.
Support of this GoFundMe campaign goes directly into making the building safe and shovel ready for transformation. A business plan is being prepared, community members meetings assembled and key stakeholders are brought in to tell us what they need but with your help now, this is a call to action. We need to make this building safe and ready for rehabilitation by 2020.
I’m Jody Guy. Thank you for listening and please share.
Images from the video:
