Our favorite time of the year is here! The Hopeworks Holiday Open House will be taking place on Monday, December 19th from 11am to 6pm. Why not take some time out of your Monday to join us for some good food, home made cookies and Christmas treats! Meet some of our trainees and staff. Check out the art in the C.R.I.B. and take a look at our hibernating Community Garden. Come and connect with others who believe in the DREAMS of Camden youth! We’d love to see you! Click here if you need directions.
What would make a better gift this holiday season? Another iTunes gift card or the gift of providing an opportunity for a Hopeworks youth to earn a job? This year you can 
A new tool called Chatter, which is part of Salesforce.com, is making it possible for people outside of Hopeworks to serve as mentors to our youth. In the past, we have done mentoring via email. With Chatter we are now able to leverage the work of our mentors and have them actively participate in our community with greater impact and enhanced visibility of their work. In order to facilitate this change, we have begun the process of training our mentors in Chatter through interactive, online trainings that familiarize our mentors with Chatter and help them understand this powerful tool. Mentors are enjoying the training and are looking forward to engaging our youth at the start of the new year. If you are interested in being a part of this exciting work please email Patrick at Patrick@hopeworks.org
Hopeworks is excited to partner with 
Many thanks to one of our volunteers, Kathleen Duffy for hosting a Wine and Chocolate Fundraiser at her home on December 3rd. The event was to help raise funds for our upcoming Mexico Service Trip and those who attended donated over $600! Everyone had a great time, put on a few calories and learned a little about mixing wines with various chocolates. Many, many thanks to 
Starting in 2012 we will have a new internship opportunity for our trainees at Cooper Hospital, working in the Organizational Development and Training Department! We are thankful for the partnership with Cooper Hospital in the development of our trainees as they work towards their future careers. External internships are an important part of trainee’s taking a step outward as they develop their professional experience and resumes. Interns have worked through our training curriculum, earned an internship in our production department, gone through an extensive interview process, and have been recommended for this important opportunity. Special thanks to John Sheridan, Dina Matthews, and Sharon Weinman for their work in making this internship a real possibility for our youth.
This month Hopeworks was awarded a 2012 Ruddie Memorial Youth Foundation Grant. In 2010 the RMYF funded an Evaluation Grant for Hopeworks. It was an opportunity for us to have someone study our programs and their effectiveness. In addition to learning about the effectiveness of our approach, grant recipients are expected to use the evaluation results to improve their services and possibly replicate the program. If an organization demonstrates through their RMYF-funded evaluation that their innovative methods are effective in helping youth reach their full potential, RMYF will encourage them to apply for replication or dissemination grants. During the Evaluation Grant period Hopeworks worked with Rowan College professor Carol Thompson to study Hopeworks, our methods, our staff, our processes and our trainees. One area that Carol discovered was a link between a trainee’s math abilities and how long they stay here at Hopeworks. Lower math scores meant less success here. So the next step is to study the details of this finding a bit more and then implement a program that would address this opportunity and that is what this 2012 RMYF grant will allow us to do. So thanks to the Ruddie Memorial Youth Foundtion for their continuing support of Hopeworks.
It’s the end of the semester — 1 week left! Our college youth are scrambling to keep up with all of their assignments. They are going to the Tutoring Center for help in math and writing and scheduling extra literacy sessions with our Literacy Director, Joshua Cooper, who said, “Although I’m not in college, I feel the ‘rush’ of multiple assignments due at the same time and late night/early morning studying.” Our youth are working hard while being reminded of the value of planning ahead. And we are looking forward to helping two additional youth start college in January!
It is once again time for Hopeworks youth to get creative with pen, paper, keyboard and camera as youth begin to make their own short films about themselves as part of our Digital StoryTelling program. The Digital Storytelling program gives youth an opportunity to express themselves by telling a meaningful story while learning a new software application (Adobe Premiere) and sharing their films with a live audience. Each youth prepares a script and then records herself or himself reading the script, which creates the narration for the film. Then they choose images and music and edit them together to tell their own personal and powerful story. Sabrina, a trainee in our Day Program says that the writing is the hardest part, “It can be frustrating because you want to get everything right.” The project culminates in a Trainee Film Festival in January. 
At the beginning of this month, our Formation Director, Patrick Keenan, and Joshua Cooper, our Literacy Director, attended a breakfast at the Union League of Philadelphia, sponsored by the League’s Youth Work Foundation. Hopeworks is a youth work agency of the foundation and nominates high school juniors in its program for the League’s Good Citizenship Award given each May. The award recognizes those youth who set high personal standards of behavior and leadership. Last year’s awardees were Geehem and Rushelle.
Contact
543 State St,
Camden, NJ 08102
856-365-4673
info@hopeworks.org
