What We Do

Build Relationships

Mabelle Arts brings people together across real and perceived differences to do something together. We prioritize doing over talking and focus on fun and creative projects with tangible impacts, including economic opportunities for the people who take part. By doing things together, we move from being strangers to becoming neighbours and friends. The resulting social capital knits people together to celebrate in good times and band together when times are tough.

Co-Create and Transform

Strong neighbourhood leadership built over time shapes ideas and projects that evolve into opportunities for community members. The best of these become permanent social infrastructure (community places and networks) that foster community connection and resiliency.

Respond and Change

Mabelle Arts is always changing and we love it that way. By remaining responsive to each other, the neighbourhood and world around us we are better able to meet the challenges and opportunities of daily life on Mabelle Avenue.

How We Do It

Woven together, these ingredients become the social infrastructure that supports community connection, ownership and care.

Relationships

Strong relationships between people and places builds shared power, a place to stand together and an ability to support one another.

Art

Artmaking brings people together to do something fun, surprising and great. It gives us a chance to make instant change; to co-create something that has never existed before and to see things (and each other) in new ways.

Programs

Programs develop out of arts-based activities, experimental projects and shared learning. Together with community members and partners we respond to the problems we see with our artist minds and explore new opportunities to make our community better.

Places

Together we co-create places that respond to community needs and desires; reflect local cultures and concerns and welcome people across real and perceived differences.

Our Impact

In 2023, together with thousands of residents, partners, architects and artists, we broke ground on a new vision for Mabelle Park, setting sail for transformative impacts on Mabelle Avenue.

Learn More

Placing Parks

People often ask us how they can harness the power of art and placemaking in their own communities. We developed placingparks.ca in 2017 to share our process, through the lens of our highly successful national project, Welcome to this Place.

Read Our Placing Parks Tool Kit