If you drive past 8911 S.E. Stark St. after Sunday, Aug. 30, look for the rabbit.

It's tucked in the corner of a new mural at My Voice Music's East Portland headquarters, painted by former MVM student OC Note through a grant-funded process that paid youth to help design and paint it.

The rabbit is Ian Mouser. His bandmates called him "The Rabbit," and five years after his death at 42 years old, he now watches over the building he fought to open.

Mouser co-founded My Voice Music in 2008 with Karen Mouser Darr after Albertina Kerr Centers cut funding for the residential treatment music program they ran together. He grew up in a Southern Oregon family dealing with poverty, incarceration and mental illness. A nonprofit called Wilderness Trails gave him nightly musical gatherings as a troubled middle schooler. He never forgot what that access meant.

He chose East Portland deliberately. The neighborhood has proportionally the lowest access to arts education in the metro area, according to Oregon ArtsWatch. The building at Southeast 89th and Stark previously housed a plumbing company and a Ukrainian bakery. The city's permitting office required earthquake retrofitting before MVM could occupy it as a school.

The mural carries MVM's motto: "Write, Record and Release." Early board members chose "Release" for its double meaning, referring to both releasing music and the emotional release music provides youth overcoming trauma.

"One youth brought the song they wrote and recorded to their therapy session, and the therapist said they'd never been able to get the youth to open up, but now this song was a starting place," Mouser Darr told Oregon ArtsWatch, recalling the moment at Albertina Kerr that proved the model.

Mouser died in October 2021 when a pickup truck struck his bicycle in Arizona, three days into a cross-country ride to raise money for this very building. He had won a $500,000 Lewis Prize grant in 2020. He once wrote in his journal about fearing he wouldn't be remembered.

The block party runs 1 to 6 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 30. Admission is free. Alongside the mural unveiling, Ascending Flow will debut the BUS-A-Flow, a mobile recording and media arts studio with exterior artwork by Portland muralist Alex Chiu. Ascending Flow Executive Director Talilo Marfil was originally hired by Mouser to bring Hip Hop experience to MVM students.

Frenzi, a band formed through MVM's AMPLIFY high school program, performs. The group wrote a song called "Arizona" for a bass player who had to return to treatment. It landed on the PDX Pop Now compilation. Friends of Noise Executive Director Andre Middleton, who first taught students live sound out of MVM's studios, will run sound.

MVM gives scholarships to 75% of the youth it serves, ages 9 to 24. Applicants don't have to explain their financial need. The organization also runs a free instrument library so kids can take guitars home to practice.

Next: MVM partners with the Portland Bureau of Transportation on Sept. 10, for a walk from Vestal Elementary to the studio. Six guitars go to youth who sign up at the door.