Watching our Soul View Photographers showcase their talent and explain the inspiration for their art pieces at the Meet Your Neighbors Cocktail Party hosted at the Downtown Athletic Club (DAC) was exhilarating. The event was meant to connect the local businesses and residents of the downtown Miami area in a night of great food, fun and social connection. DAC invited us to showcase the youth’s photography from our summer Change of Art program and we gladly accepted this opportunity to debut the Soul View Photographers and their art.

The intention of our Change of Art program this summer was not only to teach the youth of the West Grove art forms such as hip hop, photography, street art and t shirt design it was created in order to empower the youth into forming entreprenurial businesses using those arts. By doing this we not only strengthen the youth’s skills we create and stimulate jobs in our community and build the over all fabric of the neighborhood. We hope to officially launch two businesses from the summer. These businesses will be under Urban Resurrection’s leadership and all proceeds will go back to the youth artists’ education and into the Grove itself.

Soul View was established to empower the youth ages 8-18 in Coconut Grove through photography. Soul View nurtures fresh individual perspectives of Coconut Grove through the students’ eyes and creates a passion for the community through photography. Soul View hopes to establish a legitimate creative platform for the young photographers that the community and local neighbors can see by publishing and displaying both collective and individual media. Ultimately, Soul View would like to see community transformation through redeeming a hopeful perspective and sustaining growth in the young community.

So with that in mind our crew headed out to the DAC event and the youth were able to share their perspective with many of Miami’s urban dwellers and allowed the U Rez staff to network and share our vision with many of the organizations and businesses that were represented there. We were even offered 6 new venues for the “impressive” youth of Soul View to showcase and sell their photography.

If you would like to see some of their photos or order them (they are all for sale)  please email us at info@urbanresurrection.org and we will get you some samples of their work. Also if you are interested in helping us with some start up capital for the Soul View business please contact Elaina Vazquez at Elaina@urbanresurrection.org OR donate on line via the GIVE button on this website.

Oh and we want to give a big shout out to Downtown Athletic Club for their hospitality and eagerness to help us out!

Posted on October 1st, 2009 by Michael
Filed under: BEATS, Events, News