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Las Vegas Youth Groups Win Grants For Neighborhood Art

Every year, the city offers $1,000 grants for youth to design projects that will have a positive impact on their neighborhoods. Last year's winners were DECA Marketing Club of Arbor View High School, who created bracelets with an anti-bullying theme to share with a women's shelter, and The Family Leadership Initiative, who painted murals in parts of Las Vegas that had been vandalized.

Dayisha Bonet, DECA Marketing Club at Arbor View High School: "It's basically an anti-bullying campaign. We wanted to find a way to promote anti-bulling, discrimination,  prejudice and defamination anywhere we can find it and knock it out."

Dayisha Boney: "It kind of makes me emotional a little bit, because when we went to speak to the women, I thought it was just another community service project. But one woman, she was a teenager, she came and spoke to me after we spoke … and basically told me that I inspired her to get up and do something with her life."

 

Shakkur Dennis, DECA Marketing Club at Arbor View High School:  "I see bullying, and how people don’t do anything. They’re bystanders. Well, I decided I shouldn’t be one of them anymore. I shouldn’t be a bystander. I should get more people involved to try to stop it."

Carolina Juarez, youth member, Family Leadership Initiative: "Where we are located is not in the safest part of Las Vegas. So we took a little tour around the neighborhood and what we saw was a variety of things like broken glass and a lot of vandalism and trash. Once we got back to our location we said we have to do something to change this. And so from there we branched out with ideas and then came the idea of making a community look more pretty, like with a mural." 

 

 

 

Eduardo Urena, youth member, Family Leadership Initiative: "We all want to walk around in a nice community and basically we all stood up and said we should do something about this. Cause everybody wants to walk around in a nice neighborhood."

 

 

Carolina Juarez: "It was really challenging since the mural that we did was 100 feet long.  But just taking little steps like that, like a little mural, just knowing or seeing it, you know that it takes a lot of effort. And when people see that effort put into cities, it kind of makes them want to do something, do something for the community or maybe change a little."

 

 

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