[e]speranza means “hope” when two neighborhoods listen to one another.
In Spanish, it is esperanza, a word you might hear at Animo Pat Brown High School in Los Angeles, California. In Italian, the word is speranza, something that might echo through the halls of Don Milani Middle School in Northern Italy.
Starting in October 2012, fifty students at these two schools will become Community Listeners as they ask their neighbors “What do you hope for?” and then work together to create a cross-cultural Hope Gallery to share those hopes with their communities.
The goals of this project are to cultivate compassion in these students through our Community Listening process and give them the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discover how hopes can be so similar, yet so different on the other side of the world.
For details about [e]speranza including profiles of our schools and our scheduled curriculum, take a look at the information below. For the latest [e]speranza news, check out our blog.
Meet Our Schools
We’re working with a middle school and a high school more than six thousand miles apart.
Occimiano, Italy
At Don Milani Middle School, we will be working with 25 eighth graders. The school is located in the rural village of Occimiano, just outside of Turin in Northern Italy.
- Village Population: 1500
- Primary Languages: Italian/English
- Find out more about Occimiano here.
Los Angeles, USA
At Animo Pat Brown High School, we will working with 25 ninth graders. The school is located in the urban Florence-Firestone neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA.
- Neighborhood Population: 60,000
- Primary Languages: Spanish/English
- Find out more about Florence-Firestone here.
Here’s What We’re Doing
The [e]speranza project will span three months, gradually giving our student Community Listeners a closer and closer look at their own hopes, their neighbors’, and hopes from halfway across the world. Take a look what we’ll be doing during the project.
Our students are welcomed to The Hope Chronicles, and we introduce them to their new assignment as Community Listeners. Their first task: to express their own hope for themselves, their family, their friends, or the world. We’ll introduce you to each student here on our website.
Our classes “meet each other” for the first time through stories, photos, and videos. Then, each student is paired up with a partner at the other school. Students will begin by sending a photo essay of their own hope and a letter to their new pen-pal.
Students will carry around a Hope Journal and invite family, friends, neighbors, and strangers to write their hopes in it. Meanwhile, both classes will be exchanging hopes and stories with one another, giving them a chance to discover what hope looks like on the other side of the world. Every day in November, we’ll share some of these hopes and stories with you.
Together with students, staff, and volunteers, we will create a Hope Gallery in Northern Italy. The local community will be invited to view all of the students’ journals, photos, stories, and videos, all displayed in a first-class, well-designed gallery setting.
How You Can Help
It’s going to take a lot of work to make [e]speranza happen. And that’s why we need your help. Make a contribution and your donation will go directly to the project. All donations are tax deductible. Also, if you’re in the LA area, you can volunteer for the project by emailing us at hope@thehopechronicles.org
