Imagintion Guiding Our Hope(s)

With school back in and well underway, I am meeting Hope Kids ~ some of whom have been in the program and some new Hope Kids. Yesterday I met with a group of junior high students who are in our Hope-Focused Community Service HOPE KIDS program. These students meet during lunch hour once a week. During this time, we uncover and access our hopes so that we can bring hope to others in the community. The Hope-Focused Community Service HOPE KIDS program is different from our in school program in that we are not so concerned with making connections to school curriculum, but to the curriculum of life. By that I mean, we are learning about hope and our hoping selves as we interact with others in the community outside the school.

Here's an example of what happens during the lunch hour. Since some of these youth participated in the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program in grade five and then in a similar lunch hour program in grade six, some of us created new hope kits and some of us added to our existing hope kit. We shared the contents of our kits and how each item informs our hoping self. Then one of the Hope Kids shared her proposal for where she believes we should do our next 'hope project' in the community.

In order to help us 'imagine' what it would look like, she wrote, "Imagine us ..." We were in stitches listening to her imaginings of what our project would look, feel and sound like ~ I could not quite see myself in a top hat, but who knows?

At the end of her proposal, we decided that she had an idea worth exploring, which means that we need to find out more about which hope activities we might embrace, but more importantly why those activities. At our next meeting we will outline what exactly we do need to inquire about to ensure we are meeting the 'hope needs' of children who are hospitalized. This might mean interviewing individuals who have different experiences.

In the meantime, we are starting to collect images to represent our conversations together to help us to remember our stories of uncovering and making our hopes visible.

Imagination helped us to see ourselves bringing hope to sick children in the hospital. I believe it will be a tool that we use often as we work to convince each other of what is possible when we use hope to guide our service.