Every small-town resident has heard the same thing: “There’s nothing for young people to do here!”

That may be a matter of perspective or opinion; but whether residents feel that way or not, one local Mineola nonprofit is working for change.

The local nonprofit Flint and Steel has its mark all over Mineola and Wood County. They (through a sister nonprofit) have done the murals across the county, they’ve revamped (or should we say “re-ramped?”) the skate park across from the St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church, and they’ve helped host various demonstrations at many local events, etc.

And now, they’re up to something new again.

According to Mineola City Manager Cindy Karch, and Flint and Steel board member/founding member Nathan Witt, the big blue building behind current city construction (on Highway 69 south of town) is being leased to the nonprofit for $1 a year. The space will be the site of ART House. ART stands for Artistic Recreational Therapy.

It will be a multi-functional space for kids in need in the greater Mineola area to explore themselves and the world around them via art. To this end, it will feature three different disciplines of art: digital art, physical arts (or what Witt calls “messy arts”), and audio art.

For the digital arts studio, ART House will include a computer lab with all Adobe Creative Suite projects, and a setup for livestreaming. It’ll have 3-D printers, large format printers, etc.

The physical arts studio will make a space for sculptors, photographers, painters and more. The space may even host a barber workshop, since, as Witt pointed out, cutting and sculpting hair is “an art form, just like anything else.”

“Anything messy, anything artistic, we want to have,” he said. “That’s your open space for that.”

Witt is excited about each space, but especially for the audio arts studio. Not only will it have a music studio space big enough to record a full band – Witt says that they specifically designed it for high school ensembles to be able to come in and record – and a space to do podcasting or music editing, etc., but it will also have an engineering room.

The engineering room will have one computer hooked up to six other computer monitors, all of them at the same round table. Each person at a computer can edit and view what everyone else is doing. This enables one teacher to actually show students how to do something like audio editing, without everyone have to lean over his or her shoulder. Each person can see what’s going on at their own screen, enabling better and easier learning.

“It’s a creative space, but at the end of the day, it’s also supposed to be a teaching space,” Witt said.

According to him, this type of engineering room is revolutionary – it’s “like no other in the world,” and has “never been done as far as we know.”

While plans are not yet finalized, Witt says that the eventual goal is for everything at ART House – from the digital arts studio, to the audio arts studio, to the physical arts studio – to be free to kids in the area.

ART House will be supervised by college students from the University of Texas at Tyler, which recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the nonprofit. The MOU provides for students to come as paid interns to ART House. Eventually, Witt said, students from the college may even be able to get course credit for helping local youth develop art projects.

Witt says that bringing ART House from a concept to reality will take an undetermined amount of time, depending on funding opportunities. For the first phase of the renovation, Witt says they need about $40,000; part of this will be made available through grants, and part the nonprofit asks the community for help with.

“It could be a 10-year plan, it could be a 10-month plan, it could be anywhere in between,” he said. “It really just depends on the donors and the grants that we get.”

Donations can be made through the Flint and Steel website, www.flintsteel.org

More information will be made available as plans for ART House are finalized.