Bringing together youth and communities has always been a dream for Phyllis Hildreth, the founder of Falcon Feather Fibers.
“Our goal was to bring persons in the community, whether they were youth, seniors, or employees at the medical school down the street at Meharry,” she said. “They could sit, refresh and engage in the arts.”
The art studio was located on Jefferson Street in the center of colleges and universities where individuals or groups could freely come and go to work on various projects. The communal space was a place where wisdom was shared through the traditional form of quilting, knitting and crocheting—an activity that has been long passed down through the ancestry of slavery.
As Hildreth began to reminisce, she asked, “Where do you often find that calm subtle wisdom?”
“If I say the front porch, it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about a front porch in Appalachia or just down the street here in Tennessee,” Hildreth said. “We know that’s where the elders were to be found. And you could find them there sitting, and they usually weren’t sitting there idle, their hands were going with something, whether it was crocheting, quilting, or shelling peas. You would just pick up the peas and start working too.”
In the hopes of bringing youth and communities together, Hildreth created an art studio that would mimic the front porch or kitchen table, a place where individuals could collectively come together to work on arts and crafts.
“It was important to me that people could come into a creative space that would provide examples, inspiration and opportunity,” Hildreth said.
Partnering with many community organizations and universities, Hildreth sought to bring youth and communities together while also helping others through the Blessing Blanket Ministry, which extended to the Girl Scouts of America. Through this ministry, “they worked on blankets that they created in group, and then gave as a group to a live hospice,” said Hildreth.
Now working as a Lipscomb professor in conflict management, Hildreth continues to use arts and crafts as a way to bring people together through the formal theories of conflict resolution.