Each year, students in ACC’s National Honor Society chapter (NHS) are required to complete five chapter hours and 25 total hours of volunteer service. Chapter hours are rewarded for activities that were directly organized, run, or facilitated by NHS. In the past, these hours have been available for a wide, seemingly random assortment of activities such as nature clean-ups, poster-making or self-help sessions, and small fundraisers.

This year, NHS leadership wanted to focus the chapter’s efforts more on a single objective. The hope is that this will let us have a larger and more meaningful impact on the community. The leadership team began looking for a project that could fulfill most or all of the chapter service hour needs for NHS members. Narrowing it down, we decided that it was best to focus on impacting the community along Columbia Pike, as ACC is already heavily connected with the community, and doubling down on this connection will start to build a collaborative relationship between the school and the community in general, not just for NHS. After discussing many ideas, one rose to the surface: a project to propose and eventually install a public art project somewhere along the Pike. The public art project will be the main “chapter project” this year and the majority of NHS members’ chapter hours will likely come from this project.

This project will be divided into three major categories of work: policy, geography, and creative.

Policy: Arlington County has laid out several regulations and guidelines for any public art installations, including things like prohibiting large text within view of a roadway. Students will need to understand these guidelines to ensure the final proposal is feasible.

Geography: Students will need to evaluate potential locations along the Pike for suitability, make sure the land owners of the potential locations are on board, and make sure that the locations are also valid within the County’s guidelines.

Creative: Students will also need to come up with ideas for the final art piece and evaluate those ideas to land on a single, final proposal. Part of this work involves deciding how to represent the community along Columbia Pike.

The work for these categories can largely happen simultaneously but sometimes teams will need to organize certain information before other work can happen, or share it with the other teams.

Timeline:

Over the next couple of weeks, the chapter project will officially kick off. Much of the work can be done virtually or even individually, so members will have plentiful opportunities to join Zoom meetings for chapter hour credit.

Virtual work may include:

• Scouting preliminary locations on Google Maps
• Researching the history & culture of Columbia Pike and creating initial ideas for how the art can represent the community
• Deciding which form of art is ideal (eg. mural, sculpture)
• Making sure the proposal is within the County’s guidelines

Every step of the process needs to be documented so that it can be incorporated into a report to be evaluated by the County.

Apart from the online meetings, some work will need to be done in person or physically. Within the next month, two groups of students will take in-person field trips down Columbia Pike to look for and document suitable locations. Eventually, a small focus group will be held between students and the community to get feedback on the portrayal of Columbia Pike in NHS’s proposal. Finally, NHS members will work together to create the final proposal. This may involve working with business owners to secure a final location and/or finding an artist who would be willing to create the artwork.