Meet Ashanti. Ashanti Weeks is a sophomore at Bryant & Stratton College pursuing her bachelor’s in business and human resources with an ambition to open her own restaurant.

A longtime resident of Milwaukee’s Garden Homes neighborhood, Ashanti has been involved with the nonprofit ArtWorks for Milwaukee for four years. She started as a high school intern and in 2021 served as a lead artist assistant. Ashanti supported the high school interns painting water-themed benches at Green Tech Station as well as the bottlecap mural containing 12,000 plastic bottlecaps (In addition to spelling out the site’s name in multiple colors, the bottlecaps are collaged to show the flowing of Lincoln Creek into the Milwaukee River and Lake Michigan).

Ashanti also co-led a virtual walking tour of the Garden Home neighborhood in 2021. She described various murals ArtWorks has installed in Garden Homes that show both the storied and troubled past of the neighborhood as well as aspirations by youth for its future.

She’s learned that art can be connected to anything and this fact used to make positive community change. “Art is you. It’s your way of speaking—expressing how you feel and what changes you would like to make in the world. [To a young person] I would say, Voice your opinion through art. Get involved. Live for your community. If you want something to change, you gotta make the change.”