In alignment with Sustainable Development Goal 11.7, Greenpop is committed to the right to access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green, and public spaces. We believe that disconnected, underutilised areas can be opened up to a variety of uses to allow for improved social inclusion, social mixing, civic participation, safety, education, and a sense of belonging. However, currently in both urban and rural areas, pockets of underused or distressed areas are frequent, leaving many to feel disconnected to the nature and space around them.

Arts and culture is a wonderful way to facilitate public engagement, bringing to fruition a community’s identity, enhancing a sense of well-being and strengthening connection and interaction with nature. Art can also visually and materially translate the abstract issues of climate change and environmental concerns and collaborative art projects open up dialogue, understanding, and networks between cultures, and across demographics.

Through Greenpop’s Art for Awareness project, we transform disused public spaces into areas of connection and conservation around the incredible biodiversity that makes an area so unique and special.

Greenpop sources local artists to facilitate participatory workshops, drawing the artworks’ themes and imagery from each local context, co-conceptualising and creating each public artspace with local community members including at-risk and underprivileged youth and children.

As a result, these spaces are filled with mural art, public seating, sculpture, indigenous plants, as well as the engaging public participation that the spaces attract both during and after the creation of the murals themselves.