News Center

June 17, 2013 – Eleven Allegheny College students have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to build a bus shelter for the Asbury Manor Mobile Home Park East in Meadville. Kickstarter is an online system through which people can pledge funds to creative projects. The money is not collected until the threshold for completing a project is met.

The bus shelter project is the latest effort in the college’s Art & Environment Initiative, which works with community partners to promote regional revitalization and beautification through art.

Emma Cook, a 2012 graduate of Allegheny College who majored in environmental studies and minored in studio art and Spanish, conceived of the project last summer. During the spring semester, students in Professor of Art Amara Geffen’s class “Envisioning Environmental Futures” continued Cook’s research and project development and created the Kickstarter campaign, which has a goal of at least $12,000.

If the campaign’s financial goal is reached by July 17, the project will be designed and coordinated by the Art & Environment Initiative, which Geffen directs. Several designs are under consideration, all of which incorporate high quality reused and adapted materials to create a bus shelter that is also a work of art.

The final design will be determined by the amount of funding received. Additional monies could fund a rain garden to enhance the site, a solar panel to light the shelter or an event in which community participants create tiles for benches.

An estimated 40-plus residents in the mobile home park use the bus, including children and the elderly, and a shelter will give them much-needed protection against inclement weather. The Allegheny students involved in the project believe that a shelter will also help promote the use of public transportation, while at the same time championing the principles of reuse and community collaboration.

Partnering with Allegheny College and the Art & Environment Initiative on the project are Asbury Manor Mobile Home Park East, Emma Cook, Crawford Area Transportation Authority (CATA), Meadville Plate Glass and Porter Consulting Engineers.

More information on the project, including a video that shows possible designs, can be found here.

Photo: One of the designs under consideration for the Asbury Manor bus shelter.