Boys and Girls Club kids make mosaic for Healdsburg Community Center

For the past two weeks, kids at the Boys & Girls Club in Healdsburg have been creating masterpieces with mosaics.

The summer program is the result of a partnership with the Healdsburg Center for the Arts, which secured a $9,800 grant from Creative Sonoma to fund the camp. It paid for 120 children to create 1-foot-by-1-foot squares filled with colorful glass tiles.

When it’s all said and done, artist Francesco Cafiso will combine all the tiles into a giant mosaic that will be mounted on a wall at the Healdsburg Community Center. Cafiso and his wife, Kristina Del Valle, of the Colori Viventi studio in Hidden Valley Lake, are teaching the kids.

“We want to partner with the community to bring life-changing programs to our kids, so we are always casting a wide net,” said Michelle Edwards, vice president of youth programming for the Boys & Girls Club of Central Sonoma County.

Among the kids who got to take part was 11-year-old Matthew Carbajal, who will be heading to sixth grade at Healdsburg Junior High this fall. Carbajal likes to draw, specifically landscapes, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever worked with mosaics before.

“It was fun,” he said.

But messy.

“The grout got everywhere,” said Boys & Girls Club staffer Logan Santillano, laughing.

“It didn’t ruin my clothes, but I did have to wash my hands after,” said Carbajal, whose colorful piece featured a smiley face in the bottom left-hand corner.

Ashley Garcia, 12, didn’t get so lucky. The grout ruined her leggings.

Garcia, who is entering the eighth grade at Cloverdale Middle School, made a zig-zag design out of her tiles. She also called the process fun, though was a little bummed out that someone filled in the bottom half of her design when she didn’t finish.

Boys & Girls club members each pay $50 for a summer of programming, Edwards said, and that includes 11 hours of classes, field trips, breakfast and lunch. Programs like the one sponsored by the Healdsburg Center for the Arts help expand what the Boys & Girls Club can offer.

“In our clubs we really want to expose our kids to programs and activities that they might not have access to otherwise,” Edwards said. “And this partnership really allowed our members to connect with a professional artist and learn a new skill, and hopefully open up some new horizons for them.”

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.