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By Ljudmila Petrovic
Photos by Vaikunthe Banerjee
More often than not, the effort put into class projects is simply in order to get a good grade. For a team of five students at SFU’s Beedie School of Business, however, a project management class project turned into an opportunity to go out of their comfort zone and make a difference in their city.
It started as a service-learning project, where students were put in groups in order to learn how to autonomously organize and manage projects; what it developed into, however, was The HeArt Project —a photomural designed to raise awareness about local homelessness. “It was really broad,” says Becky Ross, one of the students involved in the project. “[The professor] wanted us to have a lot of creative room about what we wanted to do, and the theme was just serving the community in some way.” One of the students in the group, Gwen, is an exchange student from France and was shocked with the homeless situation in the city. “The rest of us are born and raised in Vancouver, and it was only when she brought it up that we realized that we were kind of de-sensitized to this issue,” explains Ross. “Because we’ve seen it every day growing up in Vancouver, we’re used to it. We wanted to make some kind of an impact.” And so, while their classmates brainstormed networking events, this group of five thought of ways to provide the people of Vancouver with a reminder that homelessness is still a rampant issue in the city.
Another group member added the element of art into the business project by suggesting a project reminiscent of the work of JR — a French street artist and photographer — who had the idea to turn the world inside out through photographs. From this, The HeArt Project was born. “He had this idea of just posting photos of people’s faces with any expression they wanted, just to show a kind of diversity personality artwork,” explains Ross. “The faces are a mixture of people on the street, and of homeless people in Vancouver.” The hope of the group is to create a piece of artwork that would be accessible to the SFU student community, and that would inspire thought, awareness, and perhaps action. “The idea was to remind people about the issue. I’ve never really done too much to help. I know about the issue, but I don’t take a lot of action,” adds Ross. “Our idea is to hopefully remind other students of that . . . hopefully it inspires them to do something about it.”
The project got approval to hang their mural in the Applied Sciences building on the Burnaby campus, where it will hang until they are unable to renew the approval further. “Hopefully it will be up there until the beginning of next semester, so that new students can also see it,” says Ross. Part of the project also includes resources for those interested in getting involved; there will be links to social media websites, where interested individuals can go for information about local charities and organizations that they could reach out to if they wanted to donate or volunteer.
According to Ross, there has been talk of word-of-mouth fundraising to cover costs, with excess money going to donations for Downtown Eastside organizations. “The scope of it is mainly getting the artwork out there, though,” she says.
As for the mural, it will be available for viewing on the Burnaby campus, and its fate after it’s taken down will be decided based on the condition it’s in at that time.
