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"Art became a very subtle and once in a while blatant vehicle for me to uncover my identity, learn about my culture and history, and most importantly it forced me to articulate my ideas and beliefs in a way that I never had," says Joleen Montoya, Executive Director of the Evolving Creative Opportunities (ECO) Art Center in Taos, New Mexico. For many, the discovery would have stopped there but Montoya wanted to provide the same opportunities for young people in her community.

Montoya, 24, was always drawn to art but, limited by the offerings at her high school, didn't really get to explore what art could do until she reached college. It was in college that she also began to envision how she could use the arts back home. "During a summer internship, I was fortunate to spend a great deal of time in East Los Angeles where I found art to be a powerful tool for community building," she explains. "I witnessed communities that felt displaced by the rest of society reclaim their neighborhoods with art that represented pride for who they were and what they stood for. Art also seemed to give youth a voice to become politicized at a much younger age than I was accustomed to. It was with this in my mind and heart that I came home to Taos to create ECO." ECO was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in early 2001.

Montoya explains that while Taos is known internationally as an arts mecca, Taos County is located in the state that has the poorest income per capita and has been named by the Children's Defense Fund as "the worst state in which to raise a child." Specifically, 34.6 percent of the youth in Taos live in poverty, teen crime is increasing rapidly as is the teen death rate. Only 72 percent of adults in the county have a high school education and the dropout rate is high at 30 percent.

"We chose to work with 12 to 25 year olds because they are an extremely underserved segment of this community. We feel that this is a critical period in life-an interim between childhood and adulthood when it becomes vitally important to have a sense of belonging and usefulness," Montoya explains. As she saw it, a youth arts center could help deal with the problems that Taos youth face.

Giving young people a sense of belonging and usefulness as well as giving them a mean to look at the community and world around them is key to what ECO does. "Although many talented young peple participate in ECO activities, ECO is not merely breeding more artists. ECO utilizes art as the vehicle to get young adults to reflect on the world around them. We use art as a tool to promote learning about and preserving our cultures, promoting critical thinking and self-reflection, as a healthy alternative to violence and substance abuse and to teach entrepreneurial and job skills," says Montoya.

Montoya describes an example of the effectiveness of ECO. "We recently participated in an effort to get the Town Council to approve a community Graffiti Wall/Free Expression Wall. The task was not easy, and the idea was met by much controversy and anger. A great deal of fear surrounded the wall and we worked with other organizations to mobilize youth to present before the Town Council to approve this wall. At the beginning of the meeting, it seemed as though three out of four council members had made up their minds that the wall would be detrimental to our community. ECO presented the benefits of such a wall including: teaching young people about citizenship-about the rights and responsibilities that come with freedom of speech, the wall as a catalyst for healthy community dialogue, and as a gauge for the rest of the community to be knowledgeable about what was going on in the minds of younger generations. Our presentation was complemented by a group of local teenagers who made very moving presentations about the need for a public creative outlet, the responsibility that they would take for such a project and the differences graffiti art has made in their lives."

Ultimately, the council voted in favor of the wall. Montoya continues, "After the meeting, a young man who is not yet 18 approached me and thanked ECO for all of our work in getting the wall approved. He mentioned that he had never taken part in a community meeting or discussion before. This was really the first issue he really cared enough about to speak up about and he was pumped that he had successfully influenced the outcome."

While Montoya says she doesn't think of herself as a leader, another anecdote reveals the heart of what motivates her leadership. "I met a woman who worked at the Getty Center in Santa Monica, California who was from a little town near my home in New Mexico. We were talking about the difficulties posed in returning home to a rural area because there aren't many career opportunities and the opportunities to be exposed to great art, political movements, and social activities are very limited. She said, 'Joleen, do everything you've ever wanted to do…and then go home tired.' I knew she meant that I should do everything while I was young and single and then settle down back home."

"I thought about what she said and began to reflect on my home community and my own ideas of success. This is not a place where our children want to return to…it is not home. I felt as though I was being forced to choose between my family and home and a career and new experiences. I realized I did not want to come home tired. I wanted to come home full of energy and idealism ready to affect some very positive change. I wanted to come home and participate in my community for the first time, because for the first time I realized I could be part of a solution. I wanted to come home and help create a healthy, invigorating place that young people would want to return home to."