I'm so excited to share an extraordinary project with our Wandering Educators today! Hopeful Voices is a website that shares essays from youth from around the world - essays about life, and hope, and their particular circumstances. Even better, Hopeful Voices is free for educators - and includes writing exercises for your own students. This is an incredible learning and teaching opportunity to share voices from other cultures with your students (or learn yourself). There's nothing so powerful as knowledge, especially about this increasingly global world.

In this year's Hopeful Voices, you will hear from...

A 12 year old from a refugee camp...
A boy who saw war in Uganda...
A girl from the streets of Russia...
A 14 year old living with HIV...
A girl who experienced modern slavery....
These may sound like sad stories, but they are actually much more than that.
They are life teachings, gifts of inspiration, and hints of the authors’ futures.

We were lucky enough to sit down and talk with Hopeful Voices creator Ben Schumaker. Ben started My Class Cares (first named The Memory Project) in 2004 as a university student at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied psychology and social work.  His current title is President of My Class Cares, though in reality they only have two full-time employees, so he's  also the guy who licks the stamps and answers the phone. Here's what Ben had to say...

WE: Please tell us about Hopeful Voices...

BS: Morakort is a 16-year-old from Cambodia who is studying on scholarship at one of her country’s most prestigious high schools, but there have been many pit stops on her path:

My favorite memories are when I was with my parents.  They were such good parents.  Even though my family was poor, we still had happiness with the sound of laughter all the time. 

However, when I was around nine years old my dad was killed by HIV, so my mum had to look after us.  My mum died one year after my dad with the same sickness.

My old grandmother took me and my siblings to live with her.  We started to work at the garbage dump called “Smoky Mountain” to earn money to support ourselves because my grandmother could not feed us.  Working at Smoky Mountain is really a hard life.  It is a huge place which is full of garbage.  Smoke comes out of the ground because it is burning inside.

Morakort has written an essay about her life for the new publication Hopeful Voices, a collection of essays from ten youth around the world whose challenges have given them much to share about life and hope.  My Class Cares, the organization that created Hopeful Voices, is working to share these powerful and moving essays with high school students throughout the United States.

The best day of my life was the 25th of May, 2003.  That was the day when I left the dull place where I lived and didn’t have enough food to eat or time for school.  I came to live in an educational and peaceful place - the Center for Children's Happiness.  Now I don’t pick any garbage.  What makes me happy is that I can go to school.

When I was working at the dump it was a hard life for me and others.  It is also a memory that I never forget even though it is a sad memory.  But it will keep reminding me to think of who I am and where I am from, and to try hard to change my life from a garbage picker to a better person who can help myself, my family, my society, my country, and my world.  The special dream that I have is that all children can go to school and live in a happy family, and that none will have to be garbage pickers.

Hopeful Voices combines Morakort’s essay with nine others from youth around the world who have faced substantial challenges and now have inspiring messages to share with other youth.  The kids’ essays are followed by prompts for research and writing assignments, making Hopeful Voices a powerful and unique curriculum supplement for social studies and language arts classes.  Hopeful Voices is available as a free PDF download at www.hopefulvoices.org

Mita

WE: What was the genesis of Hopeful Voices?

BS: Through my work with the Memory Project (another program under the umbrella of My Class Cares), I had been doing a lot of traveling to orphanages and refugee camps around the world.  It became increasingly obvious to me that the kids I met in these places had a lot to share about their lives.  So I decided to create a curriculum supplement that would communicate their experiences and also prompt student writing and research into the issues the kids’ addressed. 

WE: How do you choose your NGO Partners?

BS: I tried to reach out to NGOs covering a wide variety of locations and social issues around the world, and primarily used Google to find good organizations doing work in the selected areas.  Some places made for easy choices because of their significance in current world events, like Afghanistan and North Korea.  Other places came to the list unexpectedly.  For example, I knew that I wanted to get an essay from a child who had lived or worked in a garbage dump because I thought it would be powerful for students in the USA to know that youth elsewhere actually need to make a living from the trash.  I then searched online for an organization that helps kids who work in dumps, and came across the Center for Children's Happiness in Cambodia.

Sunday

WE: Your parent organization is My Class Cares...can you share a little bit about this organization?

BS: My Class Cares is a nonprofit organization striving to inspire youth to care deeply for the well-being of people throughout the world.  Currently My Class Cares houses three educational, service-oriented programs: Books of Hope, The Memory Project, and Hopeful Voices. 

In Books of Hope, U.S. schools select a sister school in Uganda and create books to help meet the students' educational needs. Along with writing, illustrating and binding books, schools also have the option of raising funds collecting and sending other supplies for their sister school. 

In the Memory Project, high school or university art students create portraits for children in orphanages around the world.  To do this, the art students receive pictures of children who are waiting for portraits, and then work in their art classrooms to create the portraits.  Next, we coordinate the delivery of the portraits to the children.  The goal of the project is to inspire caring, friendship, and a positive sense of self.

WE: How do you suggest teachers and homeschoolers use Hopeful Voices?

BS: In short, anyway they can!  Educators will probably find Hopeful Voices most helpful in enhancing either social studies or language arts goals.  Each essay concludes with three research prompts and three reflection questions.  Assignments based on these prompts and questions could range in scale from a major research paper to a simple extra credit option.   

Qudbudeen

WE: Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?

BS: Some people have asked if the kids themselves have written the essays, or if they’ve been helped in the process.  The answer is that each essay was created through an interview process much like this one.  I sent an assortment of questions to the nonprofit organizations that agreed to partner on the project, and they helped to record the kids’ responses to each question.  Most of the ten kids don’t speak or write English at all, so responses often had to be translated.  Finally, each child’s responses were arranged into the form of an essay for ease of readability.  However, we were very careful not to alter the content from each child’s original voice.

WE: Thanks so much, Ben. Your project is SOOO inspirational! And, of course, we highly recommend it to our Wandering Educators.

For more information, please see:
http://www.hopefulvoices.org/

All photos courtesy and copyright of Hopeful Voices.