Home Is Where The Art Is
Meet the Arlington teenager who is helping turn formerly homeless people into patrons of art
By Tara Bahrampour for The Washington Post
When Allison Stocks was 13 and stuck at home during a 12-day run of snow days, she read a newspaper story about a homeless family moving into permanent housing. An accompanying photograph showed the family in an apartment with bare walls. To her, it didn’t look homey.
“The place looked kind of uninviting,” she recalled. “I realized that although there weren’t a lot of things I was capable of doing to help families like this one, I could help make their apartments more inviting.”
Allison, who is now a 15-year-old sophomore at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Va., started talking to artists and homeless shelters and in February 2016 she founded a nonprofit, Home Is Where The Art Is, to start connecting them. The organization has procured donations of hundreds of pieces of art, frames, and mattes, and has provided original artwork to over 50 people in the Washington area – plus one in North Carolina – who are making the transition from homeless shelters into permanent housing.
