By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

The Orion Art Center has partnered up with Art and Soul Dreams to feature the “Every Child is a Work of Art” exhibit through the month of July.

“I had already planned for the exhibits this year but I had an email from Melissa (Parks) explaining to me what her exhibits are and I said, ‘absolutely, I’m going to squeeze it in,’ even though I already had my calendar set because it’s something that’s so important and I know that it’s dear to Melissa’s heart… it was something that I definitely could not say no to doing,” said Orion Art Center Director Karen Starick.

On July 9, the Orion Art Center along with Art and Soul Dreams hosted a walking tour through various downtown businesses.

“It’s always a great day when we can talk about the children and introduce a new group of people to what Art and Soul Dreams is about,” said Melissa Parks, Executive Director and Founder of Art and Soul. “We’re a traveling photo exhibit so we travel to a different location. We have two sets and every month they go to two different locations and then we pick them up and take them to another location and that goes on for a whole year.”

The mission of Art and Soul Dreams is to “activate a movement and a shift in thinking about children in foster care.”

Each child featured in the exhibit is currently in the foster care system.

“Each child is partnered with an award-winning photographer. So they’re a local photographer that has volunteered their time and their service to photograph a child and capture them and create an experience while the child is being photographed,” Parks said.

This year’s class features photos of children at Ford Field, Belle Isle, Lawrence Tech. University and the Detroit Zoo to name a few.

“We kind of cater to the individual child, what their needs are, what their interests are, and we go from there. And we raise the consciousness of people in the local community that these are our local children within our reach that we can help… they go to bed at night without a parent tucking them in…to think that a child doesn’t have that experience and yet they get up everyday and they go to school and they do what they need to,” said Parks. “It’s our hope that Art and Soul Dreams, as it travels across the state of Michigan, that it raises the awareness so that people can see children as children. We’ve all been a child, we’ve all had that paradigm from which to come from and we all know what it felt like to be a child and so when we look into the eyes of these children we want people to identify something and we want them to be able to see something in one of these children and have them stop and they take a booklet and read a story, because once you’ve seen it and read it, you can’t undo it and then that story stays with you and that seed stays planted.”

This year’s theme is ‘Hope,’ hope that people will see these children and take action, whatever that action might be.

“70 percent of Michigan inmates have come from foster care, 80 percent of people on death row have come from foster care, 80 percent of human trafficking comes from foster care. These are pretty horrific statistics and we can change that when we work together,” Parks said. “We believe that this is all doable, we believe that we can make a difference.”

This exhibit can be viewed at the Orion Art Center located at 115 S. Anderson St. or at 20 Front Street, Lockart’s and ABeanToGo until the end of July. For more information please visit www.artandsouldreams.org or visit one of the locations listed to pick up a booklet to read the stories on your own.