Jeremy Del Rio

Although Jeremy Del Rio’s [he/him] academic training is in Law, many of his formative experiences involved the arts. He grew up on the big street-art gallery of the Lower East Side. And an adolescent visit to the Met with his uncle left a lasting impression, as did a trip to Italy and its famous public art spaces. Throughout his work as a youth ministry leader and through his time in law school, these seeds of art-appreciation were germinating inside of him. Then 9/11 happened, and something clarified. “On 9/12,” he says, “I knew my life as a corporate lawyer was over.”

As Del Rio joined his father—who was the first chaplain to arrive at Ground Zero after the FDNY chaplain perished—on the pile of the World Trade Center’s ruins, he found himself reevaluating things. Law had been his planned pathway to community advocacy, but what was needed now was renewal. He thought about the hope and inspiration he’d always taken from art. He’d been leading an afterschool program through his youth ministry. Maybe it could provide the foundation for that renewal… a youth platform to return hope to New York City through creative expression.

That instinct evolved into Thrive Collective, a nonprofit that nurtures collaborations between public-school students and mentoring professional artists. You can’t walk through the Lower East Side without coming across one of the Collective’s 800 colorful street murals, which are a counterforce to the precipitous decline in public school arts funding. More than 40,000 students from over 300 schools have contributed (along with nearly 300 artists), and Del Rio’s grassroots idea has blossomed into a marquee public-arts project attracting major sponsors. “I could never have predicted that art would shape my life this way,” Del Rio says. “But if you’re undeterred from your passion, it will bear fruit.”