Hope academy

Anyone at school, or in your street, who could do with
a bit more hope?Fiona Campbell suggests a way you can make a
d ifference to them this year

Nowhere to hang out with your friends? Too much litter or graffiti round your estate? An obvious problem with bullying at your school?

If there are things that bug you about your school, area, or street, you don’t just have to gripe about it with your mates anymore. Now you can take action!

Hope 2008, a group of Christians and churches around the UK working to improve their communities throughout 2008, has set up the Hope Schools Challenge. And this is the challenge: get as many people in your school together as you can (plus maybe the odd teacher or youth worker), work out the most pressing needs where you are, and dream up simple ways to change people’s lives for the good in response. Then you’ve got to do it, of course.

“I can’t wait to see the impact that even 100 schools would have across their communities, but just imagine if 1,000 schools were to get onboard,” says Dave Newton, from YFC, one of the organisations behind the Hope Schools Challenge.

Izzy Edlin, 17, has got together with a group of friends from her school in Walsall. They have planned a scheme of random acts of kindness (RAOK) that they do every week in their school. “They’re just simple things that are practical and make people feel special, like giving out lollipops or puttings bars of chocolate in form trays.”

You and your friends know your own community best, so it’s up to you to come up with something creative that’s relevant to where you live — whether that’s painting your village playschool, campaigning for a young people’s counselling service at school, picking up litter, doing chores for elderly people, or running an anti-knife campaign.

To enter the Schools Challenge you’ll need to make a 3-5 minute video diary detailing how you went about it and what impact it actually made. You’ll then need to upload it to the Schools Challenge website by October half-term.

Not only will you and your schoolmates make an impact on the people you help, but you could inspire others to do the same.

And that’s not all: winners and runners up will get to attend a glitzy party at a top London hotel in February 2009. But, of course, you don’t need that sort of motivation. . .
www.hope2008.com/schoolschallenge email: readers@carismag.co.uk