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Borgo Vecchio Factory is a social promotion project that involves the creation of creative painting workshops for the children of Borgo Vecchio in Palermo

Borgo Vecchio neighborhood, in Palermo, is an historical area where most of the families live in poverty. Unemployment reaches 40% and access to education is extremely low. The neighborhood is hit by social unrest, due to an absence of public services and high crime rates. One of its biggest issues is the school non-attendance.

Our project represents the prosecution of “Frequenza 200“, project started in 2012 by the organizations Arteca Onlus and Per Esempio Onlus in partnership with the street artist Ema Jons, which engaged a twenty children and teenagers in after-school creative workshops. The drawings and paintings produced during these workshops were used to decorate buildings in the neighborhood. Due to the success of this first initiative we decided to create a crowdfunding campaign to run the project for another six months, involving new artists, new kids and new areas.
We think that non-formal art education, combined with the involvement of the entire urban community starting from the younger generation, is a really powerful tool able to generate a strong impact both visual and social even and especially in the poorest areas.

The campaign reached its goal in two weeks, getting the attention of local and national media and gathering the support of more than 300 donors from 15 countries around the world. In the next 20 days we set other goals to make the project wider and complete, through the engagement of other artists and scheduling a conclusive exhibition in the streets of the neighborhood.
In 2015, the extension of the project called “StreetArt Factory” was selected as finalist of CheFare3, the contest that rewards the most interesting project on cultural innovation in Italy.

The crowdfunding campaign and its communication strategy are doubtless scalable to other contexts, even not connected to social promotion. The areas of interest in which it’s possible to develop a similar project are wide, such as technological innovation, artistic projects, etc..
Street art, also, can suit itself to different contexts, such as theaters, training centers, jails, by involving new subjects, like associations, administrations, schools and so on.

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