Hailey Wispinski and Kyla Zwack’s Community Project Inspires Kits House 50th Anniversary Mural
Hailey Wispinski (left) and Kyla Zwack outside Kits House during the organization’s 50th anniversary celebration in September, 2024. (Photo courtesy Hailey Wispinski and Kyla Zwack)
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The students were linked with Kits House as part of their coursework for a third-year Community Projects class.
A community project led by a pair of students as part of their coursework at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) was recently honoured with a mural at Kitsilano Neighbourhood House (Kits House) in Vancouver.
In 2023, artist Hailey Wispinski (BFA 2025) and designer Kyla Zwack (BDes 2025) worked with Kits House seniors community programmer Sara Dean as part of an ongoing community lunch program for seniors called Seniors Lunch.
“This $7 lunch not only focuses on food insecurity but helps to combat loneliness among seniors, which is something many of them experience daily as it becomes harder to leave the house and be social,” Kyla says. “The lunch always involves exercise and food made by volunteers as well as an activity, and the activity is where Sara saw us fitting in best.”
Kits House is one of 10 local organizations dedicated to food justice and food security with whom students were partnered as part of an ECU Community Projects course led by artist and faculty member Lauren Marsden.
A Seniors Lunch participant creates a paper flower during an activity led by Kyla and Hailey. (Photo courtesy Hailey Wispinski and Kyla Zwack)
“The goal was for students to familiarize themselves with the diverse ways food insecurity is being actively addressed in the city and to create meaningful and responsive art and design projects with and for their community partners in a single semester,” Lauren says. “It was an ambitious course that asked students to think critically, ethically and sensitively about how they will work with communities outside the university.”
After volunteering at the Seniors Lunch, Hailey and Kyla developed a crafting workshop, poster and postcard for the lunch program. The poster encouraged volunteer recruitment, while the postcard honoured Kits House’s work in the community. The workshop brought seniors together to make paper flowers for keeping, gifting and displaying as centrepieces on the Kits House lunch tables.
“We designed it with accessibility in mind,” Hailey says of the workshop. “Many of the seniors were struggling with age-related issues, so we wanted to make an activity that was approachable for them and invited their input without making them feel like these art students had arrived to teach them how to be artists.”
The postcard, created by Hailey as part of her and Kyla’s work with Seniors Lunch, honours Kits House’s work in the community. (Photo courtesy Hailey Wispinski and Kyla Zwack)
The postcard was also a huge hit, and in summer 2024, Kits House asked to license the image for a mural celebrating its 50th anniversary. Kyla and Hailey were thrilled, and the image was turned into a “paint-by-numbers-style” outline on a large canvas to be hung inside the building. In September, Hailey and Kyla joined community members at Kits House’s semicentennial celebration to complete the mural.
“This project stands out as an excellent example of how our Community Projects coursework can not only serve the needs of a particular community but also translate into tangible and meaningful professional experiences for our students beyond the classroom,” Lauren says. “I’m very proud of all the students for the work they did.”
Both Kyla and Hailey say the experience represents a significant milestone for their creative development. Kyla, who works as a research assistant with the Health Design Lab, says the project affirmed her belief in the power of community work.
A community participant contributes to the “paint-by-numbers” version of the postcard during Kits House’s 50th anniversary celebration in September. (Photo courtesy Hailey Wispinski and Kyla Zwack)
“It’s fulfilling any time you can work on a project that’s impactful to people,” she says. “It does come with its challenges, but there’s nothing more rewarding.”
Meanwhile, Hailey was inspired to pursue the Social Practice and Community Engagement (SPACE) Minor as part of her degree. Housed within the Faculty of Culture + Community, the SPACE Minor connects students with community groups to learn ethical frameworks for community engagement.
“This project opened my eyes to how much I enjoy working with people,” she says. “It was part of the catalyst for realizing I wanted to gear my degree and my art practice towards that kind of work.”
Visit ECU online to learn more about the SPACE Minor, the Critical + Cultural Practices major and other programming under the Faculty of Culture + Community.
