Photo of the familiar \’heart map\’ from pandemic days made using chalk spray paint
If you remember our organizational mantra for 2025 is to Learn -> Do -> Share. To that end we’re going to try and feature something in each category for every month this year. The ‘Do Challenge’ is one that can be as simple or as complicated as you want.
The challenge is to use chalk for placemaking in your neighbourhood – this can be on your driveway, on the sidewalk or even on a chalkboard that you suspend from a fence post or prop against a tree. Your chalking can take the form of messages, art work or a combination of the two.
Dollar stores are a good source for sidewalk chalk and Canadian Tire has an amazing array including some with glitter and sets ranging from 4 pieces to 64 (prices ranging from $2 to $18). Avoid however the turkey box called “chalk” which is not the chalk you are looking for to answer this challenge .
So once you’ve got your chalk what should you do with it? You can go simple and just write a greeting message for your street. There is someone in my neighbourhood who busts out the chalk and cheery messages when someone in their household has a birthday. Or if you’d like to try something more challenging simply Google chalk art (here’s a great one for example).
During the pandemic I made some chalk spray paint (again – just Google for a recipe which usually just consists of cornstarch, water and food colouring – no actual chalk), put it into a spray bottle and used a stencil to reproduce the heart flag that came in the newspaper (do you remember those?). You can’t really get vibrant colours using this method – everything will be pastel-ish – but it is still quite fun to experiment with.
If you go the chalkboard route you could put on cheesy dad jokes or pithy proverbs or invite passersby to write down a single word that encapsulates their hope for this year. Get creative and don’t forget to share what you do with us here by sending photos to info@victoriaplacemaking.ca or writing a blog post to tell us how you responded to this January challenge: https://victoriaplacemaking.ca/blog-for-us
Guest Author Bio
Susan Martin (she/her) is a lifelong learner who takes her lessons not only from academia but from the people, places and nature she encounters every day as she gets around her neighbourhood and city on foot or transit. Since October 2020 she has been helping to support those sheltering in Victoria’s parks and wants to see placemaking enhance public spaces for everyone, not just those lucky enough to have a home in the ‘nice’ part of town. Susan is also deeply concerned about climate change and believes that in walkable, welcoming and human-scaled neighbourhoods people will have lower emission lifestyles not because they are consciously deciding to do so but because it just makes sense and is safe, easy and less expensive to bike, walk or roll rather than using a car.
