One Village Alliance (OVA) and Raising Kings hosted another Day of Service on Monday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., returning to the Delaware Art Museum with a more intentional sense of purpose than before.

Were really being intentional about connecting service opportunities with social justice this year, said Chandra Pitts, president and CEO of One Village Alliance.

Volunteering is good, she said, but thats not why Dr. King was killed.

Instead of entertainment, this year the events stage was used for flash talks on voting rights, census participation, the school-to-prison pipeline and womens health equity, followed by a screening of the short documentary Birth vs. Black: Uncovering Infant Mortality in the Black Community by Janay Muhammad.

As always, Raising Kings offered tie-dying demos for kids and mentoring, and there was a letter-writing campaign this year called Letter of Love, a project in partnership with The Black Iris Project ballet A Mothers Rite that collects letters to mothers who have lost children to police or state violence.

This year there were also creative projects that tied into the flash talks. In the museums art studio, attendees made chess boards to be used as part of OVAs chess mentorship program, a tie-in with the school-to-prison pipeline talk.

Were going to be talking about how it relates to mentoring and how you can intervene, so those chess boards have everything to do with supporting mentors, Pitts said. You can take them home to strengthen your own family or play chess with a young person in the community but well also be taking some of those chess boards to Ferris [School for Boys], she said, referring to the state-run school and treatment facility for court-committed male youth.

Chess. (Photo by Holly Quinn)

All ages even young kids learned a simple knitting technique and made tiny caps for babies in the NICU at Nemours Childrens Hospital, tying in with the womans health equity talk and the documentary.

Its about representation, Pitts said. Thats why were talking about the census, a process that minority communities often avoid out of fear, leading to population stats that are lower than reality which has historically led to things like overcrowded schools and a lack of resources.

Knitting for the NICU. (Photo by Holly Quinn)

This years MLK Day of Service also fell during the run of the special exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture, a curated show that opened in October and closes on Jan. 26, allowing participants to explore it for free, as well as tour the galleries with guides that focused on African American artists such as Edward Loper, Sr., Aaron Douglas and Lois Mailou Jones.

The OVA MLK Day of Service event kicked off a month of events for Raising Kings, culminating in the I Have A Dream pitch competition at the Christina Cultural Arts Center on Feb. 25.

Upcoming Raising Kings events include:

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MLK Day 2020 in Wilmington was all about connecting service with social justice - Technical.ly Brooklyn