From Dream to Reality: How the Oodle Bus Found Its Way Home
I suppose I’m in a unique position as an artist. I create for the joy of it—and for the joy it brings others. There’s nothing quite like popping a handmade card into the mail and getting those text messages filled with love and gratitude for the smiles they brought.
I’ve tried multiple times to go down the road of selling my art (you can read about that in “Everyone Needs an Annie“). While it might have brought others a bit of joy, it caused me stress, heartache, and cost me money.
That’s why I decided to focus on finding a way to share my art with my hometown community in a big way—without laying out a large sum of cash and definitely without needing to get paid for my efforts. This mission has taken me down quite a few rabbit holes.
The False Starts
Elgin has an awesome utility box wrap program through the city. I applied and was told the committee loved my art—they even had a whole plan to put my work on a box near a school or park. I know multiple people on the Arts Commission. Yet years later, my art is no closer to being on a wrap than when I first discovered the program. No problem. I moved on to the next idea.
If you’ve ever been to Rensselaer, Indiana, you know they have a huge public art trail of murals on the sides of most downtown buildings. I returned from a day trip with a friend completely inspired and hell-bent on developing a mural for downtown Elgin. I reached out to everyone I knew to find someone who owned a building and would want a mural on it. After chatting with many different people, it became clear very quickly that this wasn’t going to happen.
A Necessary Detour
Let me tell you about my day job. I work at PADS of Elgin as the Development Manager. What I really do is connect people—to PADS, the work we do, and resources throughout the community. As a people person, it’s truly a dream job.
We’re lucky to have incredible sponsors and supporters, including a business next door called Huddl Design. The team at Huddl creates amazing sound-deadening art pieces out of recycled foam that they install everywhere from schools to skyscrapers and airports.
A few years ago, we needed new centerpieces for our golf outing. We had these little cardboard houses painted by children in the shelter that we used as donation boxes, but they were in bad shape. We reached out to Huddl to see if they could create little donation boxes that looked like houses. This was my first experience with their mission to “over-provide.”
Later, I had the crazy idea of creating a people-sized version of those houses to take to events and use as a photo booth—a monument to Huddl’s support of PADS. Between those two projects, they’ve done so much work for us: custom inserts for the houses so we can use them at each event, age group awards for our 5K, and much more.
Back to the Story in Progress
I moved on to my next idea when I learned about the “Elgin is Home” campaign put on by the Downtown Neighborhood Association. You can imagine my excitement when I saw this: “To celebrate our city, we’ve asked local artists to create original art using the phrase ‘Elgin is Home.’ The featured artwork is part of an interactive display traveling around Elgin.”
I immediately set to work augmenting a piece I’d created years ago to showcase all my “oodles” in one piece. I’d affectionately called it the Oodle Bus. I swapped out one of the windows in the bus for the “Elgin is Home” phrase and sent it to the committee.
The chair responded right away—she loved the piece and wanted to figure out how to incorporate it into the campaign. A few months went by, and I checked in one more time before letting it go and moving on to whatever my next attempt would be. She told me the team wanted to incorporate the bus into the downtown market the following spring.
The Magic Moment
When I checked in with Kerri earlier this year before the market opened, she said the team wanted to create something where people could take selfies and that she’d get back to me with the plan.
I share my office at PADS with an angel of a human being who gets these brilliant ideas that make her face light up like a Christmas tree while she bounces up and down like a puppy. That’s exactly what happened when I told her about Kerri’s idea for the Oodle Bus.
“What if we asked Huddl if they could build a bus like the Huddl House that we take to events?” she suggested.
I sent a quick text, and we popped over to talk with their team. They were 100% on board with the idea. Every couple of days, I’d get a text with a picture showing me their progress. The goal was for the bus to be unveiled at the market on July 11th.
The Big Reveal
Catie and I were set up at the market for a community give-back event, stationed directly across from the Oodle Bus. Watching people’s faces as they walked up and discovered they could pop any of the windows out to take a picture—it was priceless.
The Oodle Bus is at the Downtown Market every Friday through the beginning of October. It’s made appearances at PADS of Elgin for our National Night Out event and will be back at PADS for our Grand Reopening Ribbon Cutting on September 17th.
Sometimes the best ideas come from the most unexpected collaborations. What started as a series of “nos” became a resounding “yes” when the right people and the right moment aligned.
