This feature was originally published on Creative Exchange powered by Springboard for the Arts.

Porch Light, a Mural Arts program, takes the idea of the transformative power of art and turns it into action, ultimately using it as a catalyst for change.
 
Mural Arts has three departments that focus on collaborative projects with other groups. There is an arts education program that works with youth, a restorative justice program that works with incarcerated Philadelphians, and Porch Light, which works with people receiving services from mental health agencies.
 
"This is participatory public art [that we] apply to the field of behavioral health," says Sara Ansell, Porch Light program director. The initiative is designed to aid in people's recovery, but also to "de-stigmatize issues around behavioral health."
 
Ansell's background is in social services. She has a master's degree in social work and a master's in social policy from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for a while in health policy but was most interested in doing work on the ground level, looking at how physical environment impacts health.
 
"I wanted to work in program implementation that addressed that question," she explains. "When I learned about this opportunity at Mural Arts, none of these projects had been pulled together as a cohesive program. My job is to pull together all these disparate projects that we really believe in. My work has been to really define the Porch Light program as the intersection of public health and public art."
 
Porch Light helps those seeking treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues to develop the skills they need to enhance their recovery. The program embeds public artists in behavioral health and social service agencies. The artists are not trained as clinicians or art therapists -- they are simply public artists who deeply believe in collaboration.
 
"Because this work is public we hope it will work within the community to promote community connectiveness," says Ansell. "We also hope it impacts public and population health, and increase awareness around public health."
 
The artists work together with the participants to come up with a design for their murals.

"The artist has to be really skilled," insists Ansell. "They have to ask the right questions. We want their design to be about them and the community, not just them." 
 
Porch Light is currently being studied by the Yale School of Medicine; they are seeking to understand the program's impact on the individuals they work with and on the broader community.

"This has been a rigorous assessment of public art on our public health," says Ansell. "[We're trying to] implement a program that is measureable. Our job is to support the artists and let them flourish, but also to superimpose a system for an outside [agency] to assess the work that we're doing."
 
Another job of Porch Light is to partner with agencies that will support the artists in their work.

"Many have never hosted a public art therapy program before," she explains. "[One question we ask is] what does it take [for them to] see the value of this? [There is a] culture shift [that needs to happen for these agencies] to see this as another part of a person's recovery. We do a lot of training with the staff before the artists even come in, and now we have selection criteria for partner sites."
 
Ansell argues that their partnership with the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services (DBHIDS) is groundbreaking.

"They are literally investing dollars in work they truly believe is important," she says. "This de-stigmatizing work as enhancing healing and recovery. Not many cities can say a city agency is investing in public health and in something as [unorthodox] as public art."