Windows into Paint Love: Celebrating Five Years of Growth
When I first heard of Paint Love, it was just an idea. My cousin, Paint Love founder Julie McKevitt, had the vision to combine her passion for the arts and her dedication to helping people and serving the community. I have had the opportunity to watch Paint Love blossom and grow from that idea into a thriving organization.
My first opportunity to work with Paint Love was during the summer when I was in high school. I traveled from my hometown, Seattle, to visit Julie in Atlanta and complete a volunteer internship at the time of Paint Love’s founding. Volunteering with Paint Love was an incredible opportunity, especially given how closely my timing coincided with the organization’s launch. I got to be involved in and witness its birth, including some of Paint Love’s very first projects and the meeting with an accountant in which Paint Love received its official 501(c)(3) certification as a non-profit organization. Working with Paint Love made helping people feel extremely tangible; I could actually see the impact we were having on the youths participating in those first events. Witnessing the process of Paint Love’s founding inspired me to think bigger when envisioning how I can serve my community and never to doubt the impact that one dedicated individual can make.
In addition to being incredibly meaningful, my time volunteering with Paint Love was a lot of fun, so ever since my inaugural summer internship at Paint Love, any time I visit my relatives in Atlanta I try to help out at various Paint Love events. As a result, I have gotten to know the expanding Paint Love community. Paint Love inspires me in many ways, but what I appreciate the most is the incredibly selfless, kind-hearted, creative group of people it brings together. Watching Paint Love grow from one uniquely compassionate individual to a far-reaching collection of staff, donors, volunteers, and others who are passionate about this cause has been inspiring. This organization has an unparalleled ability to attract singularly big-hearted people and unite them to contribute what they can—be it time, money, business advice, or paint supplies—to the shared cause of running Paint Love, supporting youth facing poverty and trauma, and making art an accessible, important aspect of life.
This year I have rejoined the Paint Love staff as an intern managing data systems, and, in addition to witnessing the growth of the Paint Love network, I have seen the increasing scope of its events. Cataloguing and analyzing the data on all past and upcoming Paint Love events has offered me a new window to see a full breakdown of Paint Love by the numbers, allowing me to fully appreciate the scope of good this organization has enacted: hundreds of volunteers have volunteered thousands of hours to impact over ten thousand children. Paint Love can now put on incredible large-scale events, such as the Artist’s Challenge, and pull off amazing long-term projects, including the murals recently completed at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. It has been my incredible privilege to have these various opportunities to participate in Paint Love’s growth from a cousin’s project to a flourishing organization, and I am excited to be a part of Paint Love’s future and watch how its impact will continue to grow.