Yvonne Short demonstrates the tool kit for her interactive installation, “Stat Girl” at the RPGA studio in Long Island City.

The Rego Park Green Alliance is a non-profit studio in Long Island City that creates art for social impact. Projects vary from 3D printing programs for school students, to mural installations, and now a new focus on pedestrian safety issues.

Two innovative programs in the last few years have set out to educate and inform people of the dangers on NYC streets. Stat girl is an interactive display that helps facilitate conversations on road safety. Pedestrian Penguin is a board game that teaches students about various scenarios and the implications of bad choices on the road.

But long before the inception of these safe streets initiatives, Yvonne Short found her niche in creative solutions. Art interventions, she would say. She left the corporate world, when her children began school. Her family moved from Manhattan to Rego Park, Queens, and Yvonne first enrolled her kids in private school. But taking a left turn, instead of her usual right one day changed everything.

Our starting project was the underpass under 63rd drive. It’s the hub of the community, everybody walks there to get to school or to get to the trains.

People aren’t going to get involved unless their kids are involved. They wont get involved in cleaning up an underpass, but they will get involved in creating a mural. So we decided to do a 2,000 square foot mural on one of the walls on 63rd drive. We got a grant from Citizens Committee- they gave us $1,000.

We ended up doing our first collaborative mural on a wall and we had about 300 people on the wall, painting. Then we started getting people to sign petitions, because now they were more involved, they’d done a wall! So when I would send an email saying ‘sign this petition, we’re doing this, this, this and this…they were into it. The mural was a way to start getting people involved. We met about 10 more people who were already advocates in the community, in making it better, and that was very helpful in moving us along.

For our land equity program, it can be anyone from an individual who is interested in making a change in their community to another non-profit which would like to collaborate. They might say, ‘we don’t know how to make murals’….but that’s what we (RPGA) do.

I can bring the community in to make it collaborative. So that’s what we do, we go and meet them and help make their space better. We help figure out what it is that they are trying to accomplish and help them narrate that story.

Funding

You always have to have revenue coming in. Grants are one way…. I decided that I was going to look at organizations that were doing what I wanted to do. I was doing murals at the time, so I looked at Groundswell.

Look up any organization that’s in your space, and see how their taking in revenue. All organizations need to bring in revenue. At first, what most people do, is to mimic. I didn’t want to be a Groundswell, I wanted to do collaborative murals and I looked at how they were doing it. They were doing residencies. They were partnering with schools and asking them to help bring in funding. We adopted that model.

When we went into a school, we went into the PTA and said, “Look, you have a thousand kids in your school. Some of those parents are going to give $10 bucks. If they do a movie night, they can raise funds. At first we mimicked, but now we do what we do. We went to Queens Council of the Arts and got funding. Next year we’ll look at National Endowment for the Arts to get additional funding.

Stat Girl

As part of the tool kit, children are encouraged to play out, draw and discuss different traffic scenarios.

We heard about a couple of kids at my daughters school, who got hurt in car crashes, and now we have money in the bank, so we can play.

Let me show you Stat Girl. We take this into schools. We take an intersection point and put in all the statistics, motorists, pedestrians, cyclists. We find those numbers and put them in the slots, so that they’ll know at a particular intersection who was injured and who was killed.It makes it real for the kids, and this is what we do, not to scare them, but so they know that you have to be careful. You have to be careful. And then we do this interactive game with them.

It starts off with motorists, pedestrians and cyclists at zero. And then we have a kit, and it has a hat, and a streering wheel and little things for driving and we give them scenarios, and they have to act them out. And the kids have to decide who’s right in the scenario. It’s really adorable, but at the same time, the kids discuss who’s at fault. And it gets them involved in the question of how do you change a poor choice… That’s what we do with our Stat Girl. It becomes a great residency. Then they bring the lesson home to their parents.

Pedestrian Penguin

With the penguin game, there are problem cards and there are solution cards. There are action cards and there are scenarios. On the back of every card, there is an accident happening. And everybody goes flying. We make it cute and funny, but’s also like ‘these things happen’.

There’s a guy walking across the street with his headphones blaring. There’s a bicyclist crossing and doing the wrong thing. As adults, we know if a driver is texting and he goes past the light, we know and can see when somebody is texting and not stopping, so we step back. We don’t just say, oh the light is green for me, I can go…NO…If you have two people and one person is making a bad choice and another person is making a good choice, you can prevent an accident. And you have to read the cards. At at the bottom of the cards, we always have a statistic.

We all make mistakes. I’ve been the driver, I’ve been the bicyclist, I”ve been the pedestrian. We can all make mistakes and can have poor judgement. We all have to learn everything. Yes, I want Queens Blvd to be redesigned, and I’m happy that they got $250 million for it, but it’s going to take 30 years, and it’s not enough, and if people keep texting, we are not going to reduce the injury rate.

I saw some kids get hurt, on Queens Blvd. My daughter and I were walking and a car went out too early and another car moved in on it…and we saw a crash. It was terrible.

There are several different places we want to do teaching residencies. Afterschool programs could purchase them, which we know they would do, provided we go in and teach the game first. But also, we want sponsors so we can get it into schools where there is no afterschool program.

So if I talk to a fourth grade teacher, I discover they have lunch, and the kids tend to either have a game time, or go to the gym, or sit and watch a movie. Maybe we can say, ‘give them the card game- let them play at their lunch table for 10 more minutes. This is fun for the kids, and they do not want to see the same Annie movie 10 more times…

Yvonne Short, collaborator supreme

I’m sitting on the sidelines as a creative studio, and I thought, ‘we can do this’. We can use creative ideas to make changes. I can’t go out and ask every councilmember for money, it seemed like too long a process, it was exhausting, I’d end up thinking I’m not going to make it with those people….but I know how to be creative, I know how to illustrate, I know how to have fun, I know how to go in and teach kids. That’s where I shine, so I have to do what I shine at.