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It Takes a Village

Mural Artist: Hanna Gundrum
October 2023

It takes a village to raise a child. This mural project was led by ArtReach in partnership with Children First Collective San Diego and the Copley-Price Family YMCA. Designed by muralist Hanna Gundrum, and painted by over 175 community members, this mural serves to joyfully welcome all to the Copley-Price YMCA. Painted just outside the preschool, it is dedicated to all the children, families, and child care providers of San Diego. It serves to tell a story about the importance of community care and advocacy through sheer resilience, nurturing, and hope when it comes to navigating the challenges and triumphs of child care.

Children First Collective San Diego is a coalition of organizations dedicated to tackling the challenges of access to affordable, quality child care in San Diego County. Monique Rosas, a devoted CFC Fellow, wanted to create a mural to bring awareness to the hardship that parents and caregivers encounter on the road to finding child care. The result of her vision is this striking, community-painted mural that brings awareness, resources, and hope to those on their own child care journeys.

From left to right we traverse the story of overcoming adversity through nurturing, community care, political advocacy, and eventual hopeful and bright triumph. Starting towards the left side of the mural, we see a night scene, raccoons cuddling up, weathering the long and rainy night – flickers of the moon and fireflies represent hope and persistence through challenging times. This scene also honors caregivers serving non-traditional hours. As we move onward, we see themes of nurturing and community care represented with the watering can, and village, with the phrase “It takes a village” recognizing and celebrating the incredible community of caregivers that care for our children. City Heights, in particular, has the most child caregivers per capita out of any other neighborhood in San Diego and this honors their essential work for keeping our communities thriving.

The red wagons represent the crucial political advocacy work and community action centered around access to child care, making reference to Margaret Brodkin, a leading child care advocate who organized hundreds of little red wagons to carry 68,000 voter signatures into San Francisco’s City Hall in 1991. By the end of that day, every single elected official called to personally endorse Margaret Brodkin’s child care campaign, and her efforts have since become a national model for child care advocacy. In this panel, an adult figure is walking in unison with a younger figure, pulling their wagons side-by-side, engaged in political action together.

As we make our way toward the end of the mural, we are greeted by a family biking in tandem and engaging in a healthy activity, almost as if they are biking right to the YMCA themselves. The YMCA statement of well being, shared by the littlest one in the family, reads: Well being is the pursuit of mental, physical, social, financial, spiritual, and environmental health. This wholesome understanding of wellness is a crucial reminder that the policies and practices we embrace ought to hold children, and their families, in their entirety. In the last panel, the sun is out, the clouds have parted, and the initial small sprout–having been watered and cared for–is a bright flower in full bloom. Through overcoming hardship through community care, ongoing political action, and remembering the importance of health and self-care, brighter days lie ahead for all of us.

This project was generously funded by Heising-Simons Foundation.