Banners on Broadway was initiated by people who live and work in Mount Pleasant and Cedar Cottage communities. This project is sponsored by the Mount Pleasant Community Centre Association. The impetus for the project came from a desire for more communication between members of the community; a desire to create more opportunities for expressing hopes and concerns in ways that could overcome such barriers as language, age and cultural background. In choosing to create works that would hang along Broadway, a busy commuter artery that bisects the neighbourhood, the project also recognized the opportunity to address people from outside the community and to remind them that they were passing through a residential area.

The processes involved in the project were developed with participation and aesthetic success as primary goals. Community members determine a different theme for the banners each year and an artist works with a committee to create a conceptual and compositional format that will allow for the individual image making, yet create a unifying element for all of the banners produced. Community members are invited to create drawings reflecting their thoughts on the year's theme and then (as there are always many more drawings than available banners), a participatory selection process is held at a public location to determine which drawings will be transferred onto the banners. The artist transfers the drawings in pencil onto the fabric and then the community participates by painting the banners to match the selected drawings. In all of these processes opportunities are created for members of the neighbourhood to work side by side with others whom they might never have met; the image making processes create new ways to communicate, to identify common interests and to develop new understandings. (Multilingual banners describing the year's theme are also produced.)