Public Education Award, 2000 El Arco Iris YouthPower Program

For over ten years, El Arco Iris, a youth arts program of the community development agency Nueva Esperanza Inc. in Holyoke, Massachusetts, has run a program called YouthPower, bringing children into the planning process and enabling them to assume significant roles in shaping their environment. The children of the YouthPower Project have designed and painted local murals, renovated park spaces, developed their own community maps, created street banners, and even served as the leaders of neighborhood planning workshops. For these accomplishments, the award for public education goes to the El Arco Iris YouthPower Project and The YouthPower Guide: How to Make Your Community Better, a manual based on that project.

The brainchild of Imre Kepes, YouthPower was established in 1995. Kepes had been a consultant to Nueva Esperanza, the nonprofit parent company to El Arco Iris -- "the rainbow." He worked with residents of South Holyoke to design public spaces as part of a project sponsored by the Boston Foundation for Architecture.

El Arco Iris website