Aron Hill

LIVING DOCUMENTS, COLLABORATION BETWEEN ARON HILL, MARILYN DYCK, AND THE DOORWAY
2018, 2019

30 years of listening every day to young people on the edges of our society is beyond profound. It is an honor to be trusted to listen and to hear their thoughts and perspectives.
The Back Door was created in 1988 as a community project, a community response with a singular purpose of listening to young people and to learn from them about how they experience our society, and how community people can understand and be useful to their exit from the street culture.
The name, The Back Door, resonated with young people for whom front doors were often closed. Young people intuitively understood the safety of a backdoor and their access through it. In 2005 The Back Door renamed itself The Doorway.
The Doorway opened a more robust process of including community people as a critical element to the acceptance and belief in the young people inside.
Our society continues to document young people in databases that are formatted around their behaviors. They become data on the lists that seek funding to fix them. There are no formal opportunities to hear and respect them as persons.
LIVING DOCUMENTS is intended to offer you a direct opportunity to hear and see and imagine and feel the realities of their lives. They do not seek pity, They seek to be understood and respected. Together we offer this Journal as an anthology, offering you an opportunity to know their capabilities and their grace extended to us in their learning to fit and create their own space to belong.

Marilyn Dyck.

The vision of LDP is to share knowledge through face to face encounters between diverse communities by means of arts based collaboration. We believe that each individual can benefit from intentional interactions between individuals from seemingly divergent areas of society. It LDP's mandate to use the arts as bridge that facilitates those encounters.

Ultimately, we believe that it is through these encounters that individuation and self realization occurs. We believe that the creative process is key to social progress and healing.