Our Hope Tree’s New Home!

In just about two weeks, our Eagle Rock Hope Tree will have a new home in the courtyard of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church (2109 Chickasaw Avenue) in Eagle Rock, California! Join us on Sunday, August 14th at 9 AM when the tree will be unveiled to the public. Our Hope Tree will feature more than 400 raw, unedited hopes that we have personally listened to in the Eagle Rock community from neighbors of all ages and backgrounds. Anyone and everyone is be invited to add their own hope to the tree and, of course, read through all of the hopes of their community so they can learn and grow.

Also at 9 AM, you’ll also get a chance to hear from Sam Lundquist, the Founder of The Hope Chronicles, who will be sharing his vision and some wonderful stories from the past year of the project.

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Our Hope Tree Recap!

Thank you to everyone who came to our first Hope Tree event in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles!

This project really began a year ago when dozens of humble and curious Community Listeners set foot onto the sidewalks of their own neighborhood to ask friends, family, and strangers one question: What do you hope for?

Conversation after conversation taught them new things about their neighbors. Listening changed them. The heart of their community was opened up.

Just 12 months later… what an marvelous sight to see those 300 raw, honest, REAL hopes from REAL neighbors in Eagle Rock playfully fluttering in the breeze of one of the community’s most beautiful parks.

This was absolutely breathtaking.

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A Hope Tree

Join us Friday, June 17th from 4 PM – Sunset at Yosemite Park for our humble Hope Tree, a collection of more than 200 hopes from our neighbors in Eagle Rock, California.

The Story

In May 2010, fifty Community Listeners spent an afternoon in Eagle Rock, California asking their neighbors about their hopes, their hearts, and their lives.

We talked to more than 200 people from every walk of life. Small children. Grandparents. A few friends. More strangers. Folks just passing by. Lifelong residents.

This was a chance to for a community to come together to listen, learn, change, and grow. Each and every conversation was important, and they all started with one simple question: “What do you hope for?”

For three hours, we listened and wrote down our neighbors’ responses. We heard simple hopes: that more people would sing and share music, that people would respect one another, that children could succeed at school. We heard deep hopes: that a nephew would be returned to a family, that a man could get off the street, that a struggling neighborhood would see things turn around. Beautifully simple and yet tremendously deep, for three hours our ears were tuned to nothing but hope. And we walked away amazed at how listening to our neighbors’ words transformed us.

The Tree

On June 17th, we are excited to share with you the 200 hopes from these Eagle Rock neighbors with our first ever Hope Tree so that you too can be transformed. Hanging from our Hope Tree will be hundreds of leaves, each a window into the hopeful heart of one of the people we spoke with. Plus, you’ll get a chance to hang your own hope on the tree.

After the event, this entire collection of hopes will be compiled and distributed to every school, non-profit, civic organization, and house of worship in Eagle Rock with the invitation to reflect, absorb, and learn from what their neighbors are saying. This will be the first time this community has received a collective picture of what their neighborhood is hoping for.

Join us for this event and a chance to watch a small community to share their biggest hopes.

— The Hope Chronicles Team

Our First Ever Hope Gallery

Hope for the Holidays!

Are you traveling this holiday season?

Spending time with family and friends?

This holiday season celebrate peace, understanding, family, and togetherness by taking a moment to discover the unheard hopes of friends, family, neighbors, and strangers in your life with a holiday Hope Journal.

Click here to get your free Hope Journal!

A Lost Book!

Hey Everyone!

Yesterday, we passed out a Hope Journal on a Southwest Flight from Los Angeles, California to Nashville, Tennessee, and we never got it back! If you have any idea where it is, or accidentally took it with you, please email us at hope@thehopechronicles.org.

If you wrote in the journal and would still like to be a part of the project, you can email us or leave a comment. We’ll make sure your hope gets posted on the site soon!

Thanks!

The Hope Chronicles Team

Neighbors In Maasailand

Our Community Listener Nadine lives and works in Arusha, Tanzania, literally on the other side of the planet from our home in Los Angeles. She’s lived there for years in fact. Spending her time creating music and making films with local Tanzanians, including dozens of the Maasai people.

During one of her most recent trips to Simanjiro, East Africa, Nadine brought along a little camera, and for the first time, she asked some of her closest Maasai friends about their hopes.

Education. Healthy families. Change to our community. Food. Laughter. Music.

Simple, universal hopes that we hear over and over again—but given such new meaning when we hear them coming from the lips of the Maasai.

Click here to see all of our stories from the Maasai to date.

Nadine met her Maasai friends years ago, and she was immediately struck by their songs. Songs of joy, songs of hope, and songs of new life. She shares their incredible, inspiring, and life-changing stories—and her own story of hope and transformation—in her photobook, En-kátá: A Time for Singing.

60% of the profits from the sale of this book will be used to build a school for the children of Maasailand in Tanzania. For the first time, thanks to you and others like you, these children will have access to quality education. It’s a big step forward, and it’s not being imposed from the outside – the school is being built and run by the Maasai themselves.

We hope you enjoy the stories of this week. We hope the Maasai change you, lift you up, and you, too, can hear their singing.

Urban Plunge 2010

Click to see photos from Urban Plunge 2010 — All Images Copyright © 2010 Madison Garcia Photography

Love and serve the city.

That was the call to nearly 250 volunteers from across the Los Angeles metro area on May 22, 2010.

All morning, teams from communities all over LA joined Christian Assembly Church for their biggest outreach event of the year. Volunteers scattered to locations all over the city to serve at more than 20 local schools, shelters, and other non-profit organizations—an event very similar to Big Sunday Weekend.

Then, these teams partnered with us to participate in our largest Hope Chronicles event to date—listening to the hopes and stories of more than 1000 Los Angeles neighbors and getting to know their communities a whole lot better.

Click here to see all of our Urban Plunge Stories to date.

Starting today through Thursday, June 3rd, we’ll be sharing stories from Urban Plunge with you. Every day, we’ll have a new Hope Conversation video from a community in Los Angeles. From Skid Row to the University of Southern California, Downtown Burbank to the Flower District, these conversations offer a glimpse into the hearts of people all over the city.

Plus, you’ll get a chance to hear from the dozens of Urban Plunge participants themselves—telling their stories about what they saw, how they’ve been changed, and how they are beginning to serve their city in a brand new way.

Finally, we can’t wait until Friday when we’ll be introducing an interactive hope map where you browse through the more than 1000 hopes collected from Los Angeles neighbors.

It’s a completely new way to see what a neighborhood thinks, knows, and feels.

Get ready for an amazing week.

Connect to The Hope Chronicles

The Hope Chronicles is all about connecting communities – and that means we want to connect with you. So, shoot us an email. Catch our media updates. Get to know us all over the web.

	Say hi or get more info. Email hope@thehopechronicles.org.
	Follow the movement on Twitter @hopechronicles.
	Become a Facebook Fan.
	See our latest photos on Flickr.
	Watch our latest videos on Vimeo.

Submit Your Hope for March!

We have had a pretty incredible first month with The Hope Chronicles—listening to stories from all over the world. Hearing and reading deeply personal hopes. Getting to know our neighbors and our communities a little bit better.

We’d like to cap off this great month of conversations by sharing all of the incredible hopes and stories you have submitted online during March.

If you haven’t submitted your hope yet, be sure to do it some time today.

Check back tomorrow to see your hope shared online along with dozens of others!

A Community Listener Roadtrip!

I’d like to introduce you all to Hillary and Andrea, two of our newest Community Listeners, who just completed a cross-country road trip from California to Kansas!

Every day this week, we’ll be sharing a new video of a hope they collected along their journey. Plus, they’ll both be blogging about their personal experiences as Community Listeners, and what they learned about their neighbors.

Also, make sure you take a look at Hillary’s personal hope, which she shared in one of our Hope Journals.

Stay tuned for an incredible week!

Sam Lundquist
Founder and Community Listener

What A Week!

It’s the end of our first week!

Thank you to everyone who has made this launch week a brilliant success. Such wonderful comments. Amazing stories. And so many of you who want to get involved as Community Listeners. Thank you so much for joining us on this new journey!

Here’s our latest updates:

Based on your feedback this week, we’re going to be updating the site every weekday with new journal entries, plus we’ll be posting new video interviews on Mondays and Fridays.

Three Community Listeners returned from cross-country road-trips and flights through New York, Canada, and Washington. Some fantastic words and amazing stories. We’ll be sharing their videos and journal entries in the next few weeks.

I also paid a visit this week to Central City Community Outreach, a program located in Skid Row in Los Angeles dedicated to serving the needs of the hundreds of homeless kids in the area. I spent some time with the staff and the kids at the center, and you’ll get to hear their stories next week.

Once again, we can’t thank you enough for visiting this week. Keep spreading the word about The Hope Chronicles, and don’t forget to visit us daily for our latest updates and follow us on Twitter.

Sam Lundquist
Founder and Community Listener

Welcome!

Hi there, and welcome to The Hope Chronicles!
I’m Sam, the founder of The Hope Chronicles. Thank you so very much for visiting our site and joining us on this exciting new adventure.

This is a journey that began more than six years ago as I began to find myself continually engaged in humbling conversations with anyone and everyone around me. Conversations on street corners and in supermarkets. Curbs and classrooms. Conversations just about life—theirs and mine. I began to understand how much that time listening to another person began to change me and opened me up to my neighbors and their lives.

I realized that I needed to find a way to share those experiences with others.

In short, the mission of The Hope Chronicles is to better understand the needs of our communities by asking our neighbors one very simple question: What is your hope?

Think of it as a massive social art project. A new kind of demographic study. A neighborhood journalism effort.

Every day, we have teams of trained Community Listeners engaging strangers, colleagues, friends, and family in conversations that all center around their hope. In fact, we just began traveling across the US, through Europe, and even into eastern Africa. You can read some of their stories on The Hope Chronicles Blog.

How are we doing this? Through one-on-one interviews on the street, workshops with organizations, and art projects for clubs. We even circulate journals on airplanes, trains, and buses and invite people to write or draw anything they want. We want people to be creative and comfortable.

Our team has gathered personal hopes and hopes for families. Hopes for neighborhoods and hopes for humanity. And in that process, every single one of us has been changed.

We’ve listened to incredible stories, heard tragedies and triumphs, and discovered new, simple ways to help our communities. We’ve learned that our neighbors are anyone and everyone around us.

Our hope is that others will do the same.

So, please check back daily for a new story, video interview, journal entry, or art piece that we’ve collected from a neighbor. We hope these will inspire others to bring this project to their communities. Be sure to connect with us online, and if you like what you see, please consider making a donation to the project. We can only continue to do what we do with your continued support.

Thanks again, and stay tuned for more Hope Chronicles!

Sam Lundquist
Founder and Community Listener

Are You Traveling?

If you’ll be traveling on a plane, train, or a bus (or some mode of transportation we haven’t thought of), we would love for you to become a Community Listener and ‘collect hope’ as you travel.

With our Hope Journals, we invite passengers to take a page to write or draw whatever it is they hope for. Then, pass it to person next to them. When the books are complete, we’ll have you send them back to us, and we’ll scan and upload their content to our website to share with the world.

We’ve discovered that this “random act of writing” allows people to express themselves in a very new way. Plus, it’s a fun and unexpected way to start conversations.

If you’re interested in becoming a Community Listener, email us at hope@thehopechronicles.org.

Thank you!

The Hope Chronicles Team
hope@thehopechronicles.org