Convicted of attempted murder at age 17, Philly performing artist and musician Andre Simms, or DayOneNotDayTwo, his stage name, spent eight years in an adult prison. Released in 2021, he’s now the lead youth organizer with the Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project (YASP), 924 Cherry Street, a group of young people working to reform the
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Amirah Mitchell , founder of Sistah Seeds. Photography by Drew Dennis. Ground Work by Jenny Roberts Amirah Mitchell has known she wanted to be a farmer since she was a 14-year-old intern with The Food Project, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit devoted to building sustainable food systems. “That’s kind of when I caught the farming bug,” Mitchell,
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Steven CW Taylor founded Ubuntu Fine Art, displaying his photography from Philly and on international travels. The Beholder Story and photography by Jenny Roberts Massive, glossy photographs line the walls at Ubuntu Fine Art in Germantown. Each image serves as a portal to another time and place, says gallery owner and photographer Steven CW Taylor.
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Antoine Mapp used to approach drug-dealing teens near his West Philly home and ask if they wanted to learn to play drums to earn a few dollars. “Sometimes they’d say, ‘Get the [hell] out of here,’ then … they’d try it,” says Mapp, 41, whose grandmother started a community drumline, the West Powelton Steppers &
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In early November Troy Bynum bagged his first deer and shared a photo of it on social media. Bynum, a tech worker from Mount Airy who is also a wildlife photographer, shot it with a crossbow as part of the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum’s Mentored Archery Deer Hunt. “A lot of people
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In a photo, Morgan Burrell stands on the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps, flexes her bicep, and looks down in reverence as the sun catches her shadow. The Philly entrepreneur created her online fitness, coaching, and mindset business, Get Mo Phit (Physically Healthy & Internally Tenacious) with the goal of helping women transform their overall
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Watch how We Love Philly’s program at One Arts Center is teaching students how to heal themselves and their communities through mindfulness and entrepreneurship and what the school district can learn from this program. Read the full story here.
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When you approach the storefronts at 52nd and Warren streets, just off Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia, you might notice the handcrafted facades of One Art Community Center’s Earthship-style building, which uses glass bottles and cans placed in cement to provide structure and light. In the center’s backyard, a group of students are working on
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Tucked into a little corner of Germantown, there’s a backyard garden unlike any other. At the entrance there’s a black-and-white sign with a combined triangle and circle logo. After passing through the barbed-wire gate, there’s a stone path passing several trees and plants along the side of the house. In the back, a circular garden
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Years ago, my parents told Miss Farber, a white 60ish teacher at the elementary school in our Black working-class neighborhood, that when my brother and I graduated they would enroll us in a junior high program for gifted students. “There’s a Hebrew element at that school,” Miss Farber said, “and your children won’t make it.”
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Tapeta Mayson, Philadelphia’s 2020-2021 poet laureate, knows that residents of Germantown can have mixed feelings about water. The area is susceptible to flooding during heavy rains and the loss and displacement that sometimes comes as a result. A native of Liberia who grew up in North Philly and Germantown, Mayson—in addition to being a poet—is
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