Central Washington University Campus Community Garden: A Mural Project

This service-learning project represents the first phase of constructing a mural for the campus community garden at Central Washington University. The purpose of the mural is to bring awareness to the garden by creating a welcoming space that empowers the community to learn from, work with, and teach others. As a group, we became involved with the Campus Community Garden through a Health Education (HED) course, Community Organization and Coalition Development (HED 450). The purpose of this course is to provide public health students the knowledge, practices, and skills necessary to be successful while working with community organizations. We started out developing a concept to attract more Central Washington University students to be a part of the garden through participating in a design competition for the garden’s mural. Submitted designs from Central Washington University students are currently being considered for final selection during the month of April. The chosen artist will be asked to recreate the drawing on a plywood panel for a Community Mural Painting event which will be held on the first Friday in May, and it will be open for participation by all community members. Our role in this project was to collaborate in the launching of the mural design competition, engaging local businesses to contribute resources to the mural project, and participate in the Community Painting Event in May. Our service learning project also involved several opportunities for academic reflection on this experience, and we plan to highlight some of our reflection pieces, as well as photos from the design process, and the actual garden space in our SOURCE presentation.