Tom - This week on Arizona Illustrated, we visit a new mural on the banks of the Rillito River, and tiny homes are being used to combat the widening economic gap in Arizona, Alexis - Especially when youre in the foster system.

They just, when you turn 18, they just throw you out there and they expect you to do everything on your own.

Desiree - We want to include them in our community.

They're deserving to be inclusive in a part of a community, not just to live, but to thrive.

Tom - The mental health benefits of laughing out loud.

- People laughing - Janas - I think it's a great skill to be able to laugh at yourself and then you can kind of encourage other people to do that, maybe by example, or they think ‘Why is she so light?

Tom - Artist and puppeteer Matt Cotten reflects on what it means to be alive.

It's really important for me every day to step away from that and go out and experience real space and be actively involved in really noticing everything about it.

Tom - And dogs.

We know them, but do we understand them?

America - They give you love the more you give them love.

And that is what makes them special.

(Sweet tunes by XIXA) Tom - Hello and welcome to another all new edition of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we're here on a beautiful morning along the north bank of the Rillito River.

Bicyclist whizzing by, folks taking a stroll on a gorgeous day.

And behind me is a mural that was just completed by local artist Jessica Gonzales and Rock CYFI Martinez.

This mural was commissioned by Pima County.

You can find it on the Huckleberry Bike loop just north of Tucson Racket Club coming in at just over 4000 feet.

This is the largest mural in the Pima County Public Art Collection.

It's titled Tracks and Trails.

The artists say their goal was to create an immersive visual narrative that celebrates the Rillito River and its surrounding ecosystem by blending their artistic styles.

The work honors the symbiotic relationship between wildlife, vegetation and the humans that call this place home.

You can view the mural from a variety of vantage points and perspectives change, creating an almost optical illusion.

Depending on where you're viewing it from.

In an effort to help close the widening economic gap, organizations like I Am You 360 are finding creative ways to provide housing for underserved populations.

Their focus is on building tiny homes for kids who are aging out of the foster care system.

As producer John De Soto shows us in a series of stories, these tiny home communities are providing unique solutions for those in need.

Our current new build, which we call the small home experience, is 450 square feet.

It is eco friendly.

We're building with Mickey BLOCK, which these homes will be here for 100 plus years to come.

They're one bedrooms.

They'll have a kitchen, a dinette, as well as a washer and dryer.

There has been a band aid on the underserved population and many of them have been muted or they used to be categorized as the forgotten children.

I think a lot of people just didn't know how many children are in foster care.

in Pima County.

How many are experiencing homelessness and what they are experiencing during this time.

If you're aging out of foster care, there's so many victimizations that hover over our children.

I Am You 360, through our movement was all about educating and creating awareness.

So there's a host of things that we have to kind of navigate through so that their outcomes are better.

[Baby cooing] When I turned 18, my mom kind of like, she kicked me out and it was like really hard and I was trying.

I was staying at like some of my other family members houses and it was just like really like toxic, like the the situations and the household.

So I had talked to Desiree and we had like set up an interview, and that's how I was able to get into the program to become a resident.

There's not a lot of resources out there, especially because especially when you're in the foster system, they just, once you turn 18, they just throw you out there and they expect you to do everything on your own.

And even like even with like, people have like a little bit more help, it's still hard.

And so I think that this program is just such a blessing and it it really does help like a lot of like foster kids, like transition and become like functional adults.

(Desiree) you who have risen.

And I'm so honored.

I Am You 360 believes that they are not forgotten so that they can see themselves as valuable and also be optimist for their future.

And we want to include them in our community.

They're deserving to be inclusive and a part of a community, not just to live, but to thrive.

It makes me really happy because, like, I would have like a nice place for me and my baby to stay.

I'm looking forward to like, honestly kind of having a little bit more space and like, I can't I can't wait.

So that way she can like, have, like, her own little room.

(Desiree) We believe in building ten at a time.

And what that does, it builds community within community.

It builds camaraderie.

Is it just not like a program?

It's a community of people and we all like to help each other out.

We realize, you know, you could give someone a house, but helping them see that it's more than a house, it's a home, but then a life skill pieces have been missing.

It's not taught in schools.

And it's also a lot of the kids we're talking about do not have a support system to teach them the life skills necessary for financial sustainability.

Shes teaching us about like our credit being able to have that, like financial stability.

I plan to, like, save money so that way I can like, move into like an actual home and be like, more financially stable.

(Desiree) So they would pay a dollar a square foot because we now own that land, we would save half their rent, put that in escrow for the next three years.

So at the end of our three year program and them learning also how to save on their own, they'll have enough to purchase their first starter home.

So it is such a unique housing program.

again, to get to those root causes.

For us, that is how we stamp out homelessness, but then also have a solution.

Get to the root causes of homelessness so that we can really create that generational change and break those generational cycles.

Tom - Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins all substances known to have a positive of effect on the body and the mind.

And the good news is that you can trigger these happy hormones simply by laughing.

We spent the day with a group that's been meeting every Tuesday since 2010 to do just that.

Ready?

Go.

[burst of group laughter] It's kind of hard to be in a room full of even three people laughing and not laugh.

It's extremely contagious, serious laughter [group laughter] Forced laughter or just laughing for the sake of laughing you know, you're just doing it as a form of exercise and as a choice.

And your body doesn't know the difference between fake laughter and genuine laughter.

And soon the fake laughter sort of morphs into genuine laughter.

[group laughter] A physician in India, Dr. Madan Kataria started Laughter Yoga.

He met up with three strangers in a park in Mumbai, India.

Poof.

That was the first Laughter Yoga club or class.

Now there are over 10,000 laughter yoga clubs in over 65 countries.

Truly a worldwide movement.

The mission of Laughter Yoga is world peace.

A wonderful thing to be a part of.

You know, I was the one who was sort of getting in trouble in school for laughing kind of a thing or in the library, you know, where you're not supposed to be laughing.

That kind of thing.

It's so enticing.

[chuckles] [group repetition] ‘Ooo la la!

And havent you had that experience where you're in the grocery store and you kind of make eye contact with someone and you witness something bizarre and you start laughing hysterically and you feel like you've known them your whole life?

That that definitely happens.

Yeah, I really like those sort of non-verbal experiences that we have here, even though we do some talking.

There's sort of a rule during class to not talk because we want to stay connected to what we call the childlike pre-verbal part of your brain.

And when you talk, you do shut that down.

So it's kind of nice to maintain that spirit of play Strings only, strings!

[sound of string sound effects followed by laughter] This is my first Laughter Yoga experience.

[giggles] It was a wild ride!

It was kind of like a very exercise-heavy improv class with really warm, welcoming people who gave me cookies at the end?

It was a delightful experience.

And one of my friends told me, Oh, I'm not going to that.

You're going to express your trauma and everyone ends up sobbing.

[laughs] So I kind of thought that that might be what was going to happen.

That's now what happened... Inhale, arms up and blow it out, and laugh.

[burst of group laughter] We do some laughter yoga exercises that involve usually some movement and some sound, some laughter.

Maybe some improv.

We sort of pretend to do daily activities with laughter.

We also do a Laughter Yoga meditation.

We also do some singing.

We sort of do a laughter yoga music class where we sing Happy Birthday in gibberish.

And then we close the class with a guided visualization meditation.

Because after any form of exercise, it's important to do a wind down cooldown.

And this is a form of exercise.

[sounds of group pretending to scold while laughing] I have been doing Laughter Yoga since 2010 with Jana.

We trained together with Dr. Kataria in Albuquerque, and I also had a group at the Banner Cancer Center for 11 years.

Stress can induce cancer in your body, and laughter relieves stress because there's a lot of breathwork.

And then theyre identifying now all the time More and more chemicals that are created.

I like to say you get your daily dose: You get dopamine, you get oxytocin, you get serotonin and you get endorphins.

And that's just four, but there's many, many more that are released because of the laughter.

And when you think about it, you cannot do any kind of laughter without breathing.

And so we're getting more oxygen.

And were oxygenating our brain.

[group chorusing rising and falling pitches of laughter] The laughter sometimes is hard to come by, but the fake it till you make it works.

And I had a rough spot this past year, and it just helped get me back on track.

And one of the things that they always say for longevity is to have community.

And I have found community here.

And Jana's laugh is contagious to say the least.

It's just wonderful to hear.

[laughs] [Janas laughing bursting and rising above the rest] It's a definitely a communal experience, like singing or dancing.

I think of it in terms of that, that for one hour you're having this shared experience.

I think that's definitely needed in our society.

I think it's a great skill to be able to laugh at yourself and then you can kind of encourage other people to do that, maybe by example, or they think, why is she so light?

You know?

Oh, maybe that's it.

[sound of group howling] Tom - Matt Cotten is a painter, puppeteer and performer based in Tucson, explores memory, time and entropy in his artwork, and he uses expressionistic figures to visualize the flow of time and its organic effects on us.

His artwork suggests that we are but a tiny facet in an expansive, natural world.

[ Soft piano music ] (Matt) Life is so delicate.

If you can get your brain out of the monkey mind of thinking about the past, the future, you know, being somewhere else, and just actually just absorb what you have in front of you.

You realize you are lucky.

You are lucky.

You're so fortunate to have that moment.

Even if your foot hurts or your pancreas or whatever, you're still lucky to be alive in this moment.

My name is Matt Cotten.

I came to Tucson 30 years ago to go to grad school.

U of A, to study painting?

I got really involved with the community, right away there were two things going on in my art pursuit, which was making paintings and functioning as a grad student and a teacher.

And on the other hand, doing experimental performance with puppets, costuming, fire.

[ Somber piano music ] (Sarah) I really think of Matt as a storyteller.

His paintings really inhabit this space between telling a narrative and also giving you enough abstraction and space and color and line and mark making that isn't so literal that you can kind of like fill in the story for yourself, which is what I really love.

(Matt) The less I can tell you, the more you have to project your own thoughts and ideas into the painting to understand it.

Although I know that people love to hear from the artists why it's this way and what your influences and your inspirations were.

But it's almost like thats secret stuff.

You don't get to know that.

So the subject of my paintings is space and how humans interact with the space.

I am always interested in work that shows the process, and so mine obviously shows the process.

I do like leaving the graphite and the sort of raw almost gesso white here and there, but also have layers that lead up to a rich, rich color and some very suggestive space or something really three dimensional.

Seeing layers in a painting suggests the many moments in my life that lead up to this point.

(Sarah) When he's in his studio, that is his sacred time.

That is like his time when he's really in his own world and he just gets to focus on on making and crafting.

The painting It's like then the piece can be presented to the world and you can view it and it is what it is.

I'm not just some kind of mystic person in my studio doing something that gets blown away with the wind.

I'm making objects that don't go away so easily.

What do these objects mean to people?

Painting is about the things that it is not.

It's about space.

It's about movement.

It's about passage of time.

The lasting legacy of painting is the rectangle.

Your viewers are looking at a rectangle right this moment.

This is the language of our existence.

I look at my my growth as an artist, and part of that has always been trying to break out of the rectangle to some degree.

So the cutouts are an effort to break the rectangle, bring the figures out of the ground and place them in architecture.

So I think it's an effort to get people to think about the space that they're in.

[ Upbeat music ‘] (Matt) I started puppeteering when I was a really little kid.

It's because I was a severe asthmatic in upstate New York, in and out of the hospital all the time.

And I was in this oxygen tent for, you know, many days in a row.

And so I would create voices and scenarios and narratives and characters, which is something that a lot of little kids do with a good imagination.

(Sarah) With the puppets, the stories maybe are a little bit more literal, but it becomes this live experience of of interaction with people, with children, with adults.

It's like taking this very internal process that he has and then bringing it out to community.

Which is so beautiful.

(Matt) You jump to grad school where I was just kind of yearning for something more than just a gallery show.

And so I was getting involved with the local community of underground artists that were doing experimental performance in the streets, different stages around town and so I started making puppets, giant puppets and getting into the traditions, you know, various traditions from around the world and exploring different kinds of puppetry.

For a long time, used papier maché.

Then the mice kept eating my puppets when I put them into storage.

So I switched to other kinds of more synthetic glue.

So I still use paper.

I just don't use the flour anymore.

It's gluten free puppets now.

(Sarah) He's really an outside the box thinker.

He's never been satisfied with only being able to make art that exists on a rectangle and hangs on the wall and goes in a gallery or is in somebody's house.

I mean, that's wonderful.

But to him, he wanted something more.

(Matt) My painting is always evolving.

It's always changing.

My performance, my music, my puppetry.

It's always changing.

My always looking for something.

Even though I've been in Tucson, been a homeboy in Tucson for so long.

Within that context, I want to continuously be discovering new stuff about my environment and about what is going on inside “me ” head.

I'm hooked on screens just like everyone else, but it's really important for me every day to step away from that and go out and experience real space and be actively involved in really noticing everything about it.

The temperature or the walls around you or, you know, the vast space in front of you.

Those are the things I experience when I walk.

I try to pay attention, try to get out of my head and experience the world.

[ Quiet soft music, fades out] Tom - Dogs have been our furry companions for thousands of years.

They live and work beside us and they're a constant presence in our lives.

But what is a dog's sense of sight and smell like?

Why have they developed strong emotional bonds with humans?

That's what an exhibit at the Arizona Science Center seeks to explore.

(America) So our exhibit is called Dogs!

A Science Tail.

We are exploring the relationship between dogs and humans and what makes our connection so special.

In the exhibit right now, we have lots of science related stuff and it will mainly go into the anatomy of the nose.

How dogs are able to smell so well more than humans, as well as their hearing, how fast dogs run depending on their different species and category of dog grouping.

We learn about the different types of working dogs and we are bringing them on site to be able to bring our community together and bring awareness to nonprofit organizations that are local here in Arizona.

(Tosha) Pawsitive Friendships is a local nonprofit, and we provide animal therapy to kids and adults with special needs.

I started pawsitive friendships when my son was diagnosed with autism in 2012.

My French bulldog, Zoe, was always... she was right next to my side, wouldn't leave my side, and whenever I needed Caleb to do his exercises, he wouldn't do them for me.

It was because it was work.

I'm putting a task on him.

But then I would say, “Hey, will you stay in this swing if I put Zoe in the swing with you?

” And he would do it.

So then it's kind of like, what if I incorporate Zoe into every single thing he has to do?

And let's see if we get the progress.

And progress just escalated from there.

I was able to get a lot more productive therapy time out of him when I incorporated my dog.

And that's when the light bulb went off and like, hmm, if it works for him, why wouldn't it work for other kids?

So that's how pawsitive friendships came to be.

And it's grown from me and my therapy dog Zoe to now we have over 100 therapy dogs working all across Maricopa County and soon to be in Pima County.

We've seen kids go from speaking 2 to 3 words in their speech therapy to after they've worked with us and their speech therapist, that they, with the help of the dogs, they speak full sentences, they make eye contact, they start improving their gross motor skills, their motivation, their social skills with their peers increases.

So they really help to build their self-confidence with the dog and then in turn relay that into a human friendship.

(America) What makes a dog and human connection so special is that we are able to understand each other through our body language.

Though dogs cannot communicate verbally, we understand them and we care and love for them so much.

And they have been our companions for over 4000 years.

The science behind this connection would be emotional intelligence, really.

We're able to understand what they're trying to tell us through their body language, as well as hanging out with them, giving them some love.

They give you love the more you give them love.

And that is what makes it special.

Tom - Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a few stories we're working on.

Kevin - It is a teachers market.

They can go anywhere and teach because of a shortage and get a job.

You got to be able to say, what are some different things that we can bring to make it more attractive to teachers to want to be here.

We knew that tiny homes across the nation was something that sparked a lot of interest.

(unlocking door) My name is Mikayla Edris and I'm a kindergarten teacher at Sycamore Elementary School, so I was born and raised in Vail, went to the school district from the time I was in kindergarten through high school and then went off to college.

But I knew that I loved the Vail School district, so I wanted to come back and teach back at home.

This tiny home was being finished right as I was needing a home.

Clea - Back in 1983, Our football team was going to the state playoffs and our coach, he was asking every player, What do you want to do in life?

When he got to me, I was number 84, one of the last persons to get on the bus.

He got to me and I didn't.

I was I looked around.

I was like, I want to be mayor of this town.

He was like, Are you serious, son?

Say, Yes, sir.

I want to be mayor of this town.

He's like, Just get on the bus now.

So 40 something years later, here is Tom - Thank you for joining us from here on the banks of the Rillito River, where you can see this beautiful new mural.

Tracks and trails by Rock CYFI Martinez and Jessica Gonzales.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week for another all new episode.