“Rise“ 2021. Mural by Salina Almanzar and Eleazar Jimenez
about seed project. seed project is a 5-year community arts project co-initiated by josh graupera and Salina Almanzar
seed project’s mission is to foster a process of building relationships, connections, and mutual support in Southeast Lancaster City, in hopes that neighborhood-centered artworks, projects, and collaborations emerge from our time spent together. This effort centers BIPOC artists and residents in or from Southeast Lancaster.
Context of other ongoing projects:
In 2016, The Pennsylvania Downtown Center award SACA an Elm Street Program grant. SACA and many of the other community organizations created a steering committee and proposed a $10.6m revitalization plan for Southeast Lancaster. In 2018, The Wells Fargo Regional Foundation awarded the Elm Street Project Steering Committee $100,000 to facilitate neighborhood engagement and surveys to help finalize the revitalization plan. Last year, the Foundation agreed to invest $890,000 over the next 4 years.
Southeast profile (LNP)
About 12,000 people live in the southeast. It has the highest poverty rate of Lancaster’s four quadrants, the legacy of economic and racial segregation, compounded by the destruction of a major section of the neighborhood for public housing in the 1960s and 1970s.
The neighborhood plan will cover the same area as the Elm Street designation: a square mile bounded by East King Street to the north, South Broad Street and the Conestoga River to the east, Chesapeake Street to the south, and South Queen Street to the west.
In the winter of 2019, the Spanish American Civic Association (SACA) was awarded the Creative Communities Project grant for creative and artistic projects in South East Lancaster. This grant has allowed the seed project to launch.