Erin Williams

35 years ago, Kathy Hall was a single mother of three in search of a male role model for her then 7 year-old son. She decided to enroll him in her neighborhood Boy Scout troop, under the Grand Towers district. When she found out that there were no parents whatsoever involved in the troop, she took it upon herself to carry the gauntlet, and became the den mother to about 15 young cub scouts.

When British conceptual artist Jeremy Deller chose to stage his first private exhibition back in 1993, he decided to go with a small, intimate setting he knew well: his bedroom.

“It wasn’t so full of people, but I didn’t want it to be full of people,” he says of Open Bedroom, which was by invitation only. “I was terrified that someone would put a cigarette end out on a table or a carpet or something.”

Three years ago, Pastor Brian Schmidgall moved from Wisconsin to St. Louis on a mission: to try to right the racial wrongs of St. Louis City through faith. He bought a home on the north side of Delmar Boulevard, and spent the next two years learning the folds of what the community needed in order to come together and move forward.