COMMUNITY PROJECTS
In addition to art, I am also passionate about my local communities (without which I would be nowhere in my art or otherwise). I show up at a lot of community events and also have several large side projects focused on compiling community resources. See below for my top three of the latter!
This is a Google Map of local sources of food for Virginia, including farms, farmstands, farmers markets, food banks, and more. It started focused around the Valley region but received so much statewide support that I expanded it across all of Virginia. It currently has nearly all the food banks in the state on the map, and I'm continuously working on it to add more farms, farmers markets, etc. If you have any of these local food resources to submit, you can do so here because this map is also powered by local knowledge, especially where small farmstands are concerned, since those are not cataloged in any official database.
This is a set of resource lists by locality that cover everything from adult loneliness to homelessness to library resources and more. For each locality, the resources are organized in alphabetized categories, and for the ones I manage, they're updated constantly with new resources as I find them. These lists are for more than just helping people experiencing desparate circumstances - they can help anyone find resources in their community that they didn't previously know about, ex: One city has a "tool library" where you can checkout tools (including power tools) to work on home projects instead of buying them. This project is set up so that other people can make locality-level lists and add them to my main list. See here to learn how to contribute a list and click the title or see below to access the existing lists. The image is the one I use on magnets, which I order and give out to people. They're handy because people can keep them on their fridges then scan any time they have a need, and because the lists are constantly updated, you could scan one day and not find anything to help you then scan the next day and find the solution to your problems!
This is a Google Drive folder of miscellaneous community resources I've compiled, including promotional materials for my Food Map and guides on how to make your own resource maps and lists. There is also a spreadsheet of various foods and their times to expiration from date of purchase in the main folder. That's a project I've been working on to help people maximize their grocery budgets and minimize food waste. Click the title to access it and see two of the resources within the folder below:
