"When we create beauty, it's like we make a fire in the dark night of winter. This gives us hope, it gives us warmth. It beckons to other people to come and work together," said Lily Yeh in an Orion Magazine webinar with Trebbe Johnson and Glenn Albrecht. Lily works with people with people in poor, broken, disenfranchised communities to create works of public art that empower people and effect social change. Beginning in 2004, ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, she launched the Rwanda Healing Project.

At that time, the site of a mass grave in the Rugerero District was marked only by a sign posted by a few posts propping up a rusty metal roof. Yeh worked with survivors to create Genocide Memorial Park, an open, grassy area surrounded by a wall of sculpted peaks and valleys through which a processional walkway leads to a covered pavilion made of colorful mosaic tiles. A few steps below ground is the Bone Chamber, a sanctuary where bones discovered during the construction process lie in state. A few people at a time may enter, remember, grieve--and return to the light.

"Through the broken places, through the broken hearts, through the broken family structure, somehow it creates an opening that we can enter into the depths of what it means to be human," Lily says.