Sutter Middle School in Northridge was the first official location for Beautify Earth’s educational endeavors, where they worked on a series of murals in collaboration with The Child and Family Guidance Center depicting a theme of anti-bullying. “It’s a very cheap and amazing way to transform an environment,” notes Sergio Cuculiza, Beautify’s Educational Director. “You have these drab, dreary environments that students are supposed to be inspired in… If we can teach educators, parents and students that this should be the norm, it will be a much more sustainable and enduring phenomena, than if we have to carry them.”
One of the ways that Beautify has been able to inspire action in schools is to generate contests where students all submit their designs and paintings for murals, and then the most popular actually go into effect. Looking down the line, Cuculiza says, “the end game of our program is to paint entire schools.”
One of the intentions of Beautify Earth is not for the organization itself to paint every wall, but to inspire that every wall will be painted if we all work together.