Day of Caring comes to Santa Rosa’s Moorland Avenue neighborhood

Multicolored roses and butterflies painted Tuesday on two sections of Moorland Avenue fencing were created using large wooden stencils, and not just so there would be uniformity in the shape and style of the figures.

Artist Daniel Doughty said the motive went beyond how the finished product might look and instead focused on how it was to be accomplished, utilizing teams of law enforcement and community volunteers.

“Just to do the stencils you need two people,” one to hold the stencil in place and the other to brush paint around the cut-out shape, Doughty said. “It forces you to partner, to bond with someone.”

The Moorland Avenue project is part of an extended community beautification effort, undertaken in part to promote trust and improved communication in the neighborhood three years since 13-year-old Andy Lopez was gunned down nearby by a Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy, who mistook his airsoft BB gun for an authentic assault rifle.

On Wednesday, the murals were also among 43 projects around the county designated official worksites for the annual Day of Caring, founded by the United Way and sponsored by the county in league with the city of Santa Rosa. Close to 400 people, many of them city and county employees, applied to participate, according to event organizer Sylvia Lemus, the programs manager with Sonoma County Human Resources.

Most of this year’s projects were focused on low-cost housing and homeless initiatives, Lemus said.

Volunteers were deployed to a variety of group homes, shelters, community centers and public open spaces, where volunteers worked cleaning, organizing, clearing weeds and brush and the like. Recipients included the Redwood Empire Food Bank, Food for Thought, Doran Beach, Finley Park, Bayer Farm and the Bennett Family Senior Center.

But a number of the projects involved the more personal spaces of elderly or ill individuals unable to do for themselves, including one where volunteers found themselves seeking additional help for the client, including a wheelchair, Lemus said.

“This is an extension of public service,” she said. “They really take it on.”

As “a Moorland child,” Lemus said, she found the south Santa Rosa mural project especially important. She stopped by to check on its progress, while several sheriff’s deputies and staff joined with a couple of neighborhood volunteers to help brighten a neighborhood that has known more than its share of grief and anger since the death of Lopez three year ago.

The highly publicized incident inflamed bitterness and distrust throughout the neighborhood, which has often felt neglected by city and county officials who have worked since to reach out to the community and build engagement in its wake.

The county is developing a new park called Andy’s Unity Park on the more than 4 acres of land at Moorland and West Robles avenues that neighbors and community activists turned into a memorial site after Lopez died there. Up the street, at least four nearly blocklong lengths of sidewalk fencing have been designated for decorative murals, designed both to enliven the area and to dissuade taggers from leaving their marks there.

Vince Harper, assistant director of community engagement at Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County, said the first mural painted about six weeks ago and featuring stenciled doves and olive branches drew as many as 18 neighborhood volunteers who gathered to work, socialize and enjoy tamales.

On Wednesday, as it was a workday, fewer neighbors were available, but among them were Melanie Willis, 47, part of Moorland Avenue Neighborhood Action Team.

“It’s about rebirth for this place, just beautifying it,” Willis said. “It’s about reformation, rebirth and regrowth, and hopefully people see that.”