Berenice Badillo learned firsthand how art could help people change when it helped her through her own “tumultuous adolescence.”
“In 11th grade, my high school counselor advised me not to attend college, saying, ‘Just forget about that, you will never make it,’” she recalls. After high school, she eventually began working at a homeless shelter for youth started painting the walls and furniture with the teens there. She began noticing that the painting activity helped them engage and communicate with each other. That led her to start a violence prevention arts program for them. “Art soon became my platform, and I utilized art as a tool for diffusion and de-escalation, to unite, and to empower.”
