Mantua and Powelton Village have just as many nonprofit art organizations as Chinatown, North 3rd Street and Germantown Ave., and are located just across the river from the museums on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but the area is rarely cited as an arts scene in Philadelphia. A new kind of artist residency program is getting ready to expand the number of studios even more, revitalizing the neighborhood without changing its fabric.

The Mural Arts Program is working with a number of partners, including the People’s Emergency Center and the Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, to bring in a Vancouver and Ontario-based collective called Broken City Lab to launch the city’s first Neighborhood Time Exchange program. In exchange for a residency with studio space and some resources, artists who are accepted into the program agree to invest an hour of their time in the community for every hour spent working on their own projects.

In addition to an area ripe with studios and art initiatives, Mantua is also a Promise Zone, one of five cities areas the country selected by President Obama last year to receive financial and hands-on assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in revitalization and investment efforts.

While artists will take advantage of that revitalization through the Neighborhood Time Exchange program, they will also build relationships in the community. In their applications, artists were asked to illustrate initial ideas for community projects or volunteer opportunities.

The first artists will be West Philadelphia’s own Betty Leacraft who weaves different techniques to create textiles influenced by the African Diaspora; West Philadelphia-based Ian Sampson, whose passion is comics; and New York-based photographer Philippe Leonard. All the artists will open their doors to neighbors every second Friday of the month during a citywide art crawl.