Friday post from NOLA

For those of you wondering what the heck NOLA is...it's New Orleans, Louisiana.  

This post comes from NOLA intern Leigh Durham

Greetings from NOLA! I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday with their friends and family. One thing that we’re grateful for here is our recent partnership event with the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, or NOCCA.  NOCCA is an arts training center for secondary-school age students. The program is tuition-free to Louisiana students.

On Monday, November 21, Naomi and I went to NOCCA’s beautiful campus in the Bywater neighborhood to introduce the mission of One Million Bones to over 600 students during two afternoon sessions. Since its inception in 1973, our OMB event was the first time NOCCA had gathered the entire school together under one cause. Following a presentation and a video of the Albuquerque 50,000 Bones Preview Installation, students spread out across the campus to make bones! The arts department at NOCCA graciously provided all of the materials and clay and even offered to store the bones made from the event as part of a campus display until our New Orleans preview installation in March 2012.

We were thrilled at the enthusiasm of the administration, teachers, and students and amazed at the creativity exhibited. I saw a full ribcage created by an especially determined volunteer! We’ll have a final count after the clay bones are fired, but we estimate that we made over 2,500 bones in one day!  That’s 2,500 closer to the preview installation and they count towards the Students Rebuild tally.

As for other news from New Orleans, we will be holding our first Saturday open studio this week from 11-2 at our location here at Unfold Media in the heart of the French Quarter. We’re inviting volunteers to stop by and make bones, learn more about the project and get to know one another! We’re also moving along in our goal to pass a Conflict-Free Campus Initiative at Tulane University and plan on forming a coalition of students at other local universities to work towards passing the same resolution.

Here’s to many more inspiring events like that at NOCCA and thanks to all who are supporting our mission in New Orleans!

From both the Albuquerque and NOLA OMB teams, have a fantastic weekend!

Comments

[destinie]

I was at nocca that day! It was great! I told the president of the service organization at my school about it and she wants to host an event run by the club. We are just getting permission from the sponsers first...

[Susan]

Destinie, that's fantastic! And, if you do hold an event, remember to register it with One Million Bones' partner Students Rebuild so your bones will add to the count to trigger donations to CARE for their work in Somalia and the DRC.

Let me know if you want more information about that, or check it out on our website, under the educators tab.