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The Walls Project: From Painting Murals to Moving Policy

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, The Walls Project in Baton Rouge, La., has grown from a loosely formed community arts group with a focus on social justice to a highly organized hub for driving local improvements in health, safety, and prosperity. Along this journey, Voices for Healthy Kids has been a critical partner, not only for providing funding and technical support but also for raising the project’s visibility with other investors and collaborators.

“Voices for Healthy Kids has really changed our work,” says Casey Phillips, executive director of The Walls. “It’s had a power that nobody could have anticipated, but I’m here to say it’s very real.”

The Walls started out in 2012, as a collection of local artists who painted murals with social messages on the challenges to overcoming poverty. But the COVID-19 pandemic changed all that. The people at The Walls had always maintained close relationships with other grassroots community organizations. During the pandemic, they channeled those relationships to form a COVID response network of about 80 organizations that have met weekly for over 180 weeks to address a different driver of poverty, focusing initially on food equity and moving on to issues like education, equal pay, transportation, and affordable housing. This group evolved into the OneRouge Coalition (ORC), a collective action coalition organized by The Wall and their partners at MetroMorphosis, a local nonprofit.

A National Funding Partner

At that time, The Walls had just one local funder for ORC. Voices for Healthy Kids, an initiative of the American Heart Association (AHA), became their second funder, making a huge difference in their operations—and their impact.

“As an arts and social justice organization in the conservative South, you’re not exactly taken seriously when you talk about transportation, environmental racism, and education,” Phillips says. “But after COVID hit and we began working with Voices for Healthy Kids, people started to get what we were trying to do with our multi-issue work.”

Shaping Policy

Voices for Healthy Kids, in fact, has funded The Walls to coordinate three policy initiatives on issues selected by community-based focus groups.

One of them involved working with the Three O’Clock Project, an afterschool program, and the East Baton Rouge Parish system to gain approval for a new Good Food Purchasing Policy aimed at improving the nutritional quality of school meals.

In another initiative, The Walls coordinated with BREADA, a nonprofit that works with farmers and farmers markets, to convince the state legislature to double the value of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dollars spent by consumers at participating farmers markets. The “SNAP Match,” as it’s called, helps residents bring home more locally grown produce while helping farmers get more business.

Staff at The Walls are also working with BREADA to improve public transportation options to the Red Stick Farmers Market in Baton Rouge, so that people without cars can get to the market more easily and reliably.

For the third initiative, the nonprofit Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX) is working to strengthen the city’s Complete Streets policy to make travel easier for residents and help reduce poverty and unmet social needs.

From Education to Action

Pepper Roussel, program coordinator for ORC, says the support of Voices for Healthy Kids has helped the group move “beyond education to action.”

She added that she especially values the Voices for Healthy Kids annual Summit of grantees, where participants share not only their wins but also lessons learned the hard way. “It’s about the entire experience and really being honest,” she says.

Phillips says that he is especially grateful to AHA and Voices for Healthy Kids for investing in The Walls so early in its development. “It’s unusual for a national organization to fund something that is just in its origins,” he said, noting that The Walls has since branched out to establish programs in Texas and Colorado. “All of the magic that’s happened with The Walls these last three years would not have been possible without AHA and Voices for Healthy Kids,” he says.