Feel at Home project

Immigrant and Refugee Support

County of Los Angeles

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative

The "Feel at Home" project is aimed at refugees and immigrants who flock to Los Angeles in search of their life. The adaptation process is very painful due to losing a home and usual life. For many people, feeling at home is the rod that helps them cope with challenges from external circumstances. In the "Feel at Home" project, we offer a creative program for art therapy specialists. They will conduct art classes for children and adolescents to explore the meaning of their home through architecture, design, painting, and artificial intelligence algorithms. The program was developed by Dutch and Ukrainian architects, with the participation of designers from Los Angeles. Our art volunteers will be able to work on questions such as: What does home mean and how does your future home look like? When can your city feel at home? The project will help refugees and immigrants to adapt more easily and will be the basis for creative workshops to address the social problems of homelessness.

The program "Feel at Home" includes a two-step course (Spring and Autumn) for groups of 15-30 art volunteers from different areas of Los Angeles County. The courses will be held 2 times a week, on the territory of the Helms Design Center in the format of workshops, lectures, discussions, modeling, and excursions to the workshops of designers, architects, and artists for unique methodic. Based on the results of the course, each student will create a self-workshop with children from immigrant and low-income families and present it at the final exhibition. Coverage will be 100-3000 people. The teachers of the course will be experienced specialists from Urban Reform, who have successfully implemented this project in Rotterdam (Holland) for Ukrainian refugees. As part of the course, we planned trips to museums, exhibitions, and workshops with famous graphic designers and artists living in the USA. Among them are Parisa Tashakori, Mirko Ilich, and Natalie Volpe, who tell their own immigrant story and adoption in the USA. The highlight of the course will be the arrival of a special tutor from Switzerland of the famous Ukrainian muralist Roman Minin. Roman actively uses virtual and augmented reality in his work. Roman Minin will introduce students to the algorithms for creating art objects. Having mastered the new toolkit, children will model an image of their dream home in Los Angeles, which will become a kind of project goal for the implementation of this image in the future.

The Feel at Home project is a guide to action that can be implemented at the national community level and used to train future art volunteers who work with refugees, immigration issues, and low-income. The State of California has more than 11 million immigrants, making the homeless problem one of the key places in building a healthy and prosperous society. The program will help 15-30 art volunteers basics of a profession, and build new networks of art classes where the meaning of home will be explored. In the long term, this project can be implemented in every county of Los Angeles, and help the psychological problem of absence at home, as a result, the desire for a new socialized future.

The project is a pilot for the US, but have an international experience recently implemented in the Netherlands showing that it causes various influences and results. We are expecting it in the US by having a questionnaire and interviews of participants at the end of the project. The minimum expected results are: Participants have been involved in creative activity, created new social networks, helped to integrate & adapt and start to feel a belonging to a new city and get interested in creative professions and spheres of architecture, design, art, community, and city life. Inclusiveness and knowledge exchange between the American local professional and artists and international specialists. A unique Practical Educational Guide at the end of the project for spreading to more auditory. specially developed methodology making it a long-term opportunity, open for other organizations and initiatives to continue.

Los Angeles Design Festival is a non-profit, thanks to which we have the opportunity to apply for a grant. Helms Design District provides space for the course Urban Reform is a creator of the program for the assimilation and adoption of refugees. This program is a key component for the implementation of the project Art Territory Ukraine is a public organization that takes on the responsibility of attracting specialized artists to the project and conducting workshops PosterTerritory is an organization that takes on the responsibility of attracting specialized designers to the project and conducting workshops