Project Hope's Open House

I was excited to attend a bit of the Project Hope open house yesterday (the Mayor was even there!), at their new community building on Dudley Street.  It's the first "green" building in Roxbury and a vastly different space than their building on Magnolia St (which is a former residence of nuns), where they crowded both their residential and education programs into one building.  Here's the blurb from their press release on the new building:

"The building, constructed with recycled materials and designed to be "earth-friendly" through its use of low-energy elevators and natural light, is fully equipped with two state-of-the-art computer centers, a spacious community room with a projection screen, a number of sizeable classrooms and administrative offices with outstanding views of Boston's skyline. The new building stands as a symbol of hope for all clients that step through the glass doors and into the polished, professional lobby of Project Hope's headquarters."

I met Char, a teacher at Project Hope, at a digital storytelling session I did at Umass Boston and she instantly got SO excited about the possibilities of bringing digital storytelling into their curriculum for adult literacy for low-income women.  She ended up recruiting Natasha Freidus from Creative Narrations to run a workshop with her teachers over the summer, and they created a story together about how they created a beautiful space for learning and sharing at the old building and their hopes to recreate it at the new building.  (I'm still nagging Char to get a copy of the finished story online...stay tuned.)

Now that the great folks at Project Hope have this lovely new Community Resource Lab in addition to a new lab upstairs for the literacy classes. I'm excited because now Char can incorporate more technology and digital storytelling into her curriculum.  

On a personal note, I was highly amused by the intricate catering...even though I had to leave before I got to eat any of it...