August 2011

Join us for dinner and dancing at our 7th Annual Hopeworks Celebration of Accomplishments Gala! This event will begin at 6:30pm on Friday, September 30th, 2011 and will take place at the Venice Plaza Banquet hall located at 281 Cross Keys Road, Berlin, New Jersey. Thanks to our wonderful supporters, we will have an excellent assortment of one-of-a kind Live, Silent, and Basket Auction items that will be available for those attending the gala. So, come and celebrate our youth’s great accomplishments,  and reflect with us on this past year! Check out our Dinner page for more information! And check out our venue!

Congratulaions to Erika Sanchez, Vannessa Rivera, Adriana Castro and Sade Coley, all winners of $750 College Scholarships form Hopeworks. Adriana, Vanessa and Sade are all repeat winners, each of them continuing their quest for their Bachelor’s Degrees. Adriana will be starting her sophomore year at Kean University, Vanessa is starting her sophomore year at Chestnut Hill College, and Sade is entering her senior year at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Erika is transferring this fall to Rutgers University from Camden County College. Thanks to all who make these scholarships possible and good luck to this years scholarship winners!

Hopeworks ‘N Camden has been chosen to ring the closing bell of the NASDAQ Stock Exchange on Monday, August 29th. Hopeworks COO Michael Sontag will be joined by Hopeworks youth trainees, staff, Hopeworks Board Members, as well as long time supporters from Symantec Inc. This event highlights Hopeworks successful Youth Development Organization as they recognize having their 120th trainee start college on August 29th.

“Ringing the Closing Bell is a great opportunity to recognize our youth, our staff, clients, grantors, donors and board members for their dedicated support in building Hopeworks into a leader in Youth Development in Camden, NJ,” said Father Jeff. The event is held at NASDAQ MarketSite located in the heart of New York’s Times Square. Each day MarketSite hosts some of the world’s most prestigious business leaders to preside over the Market Open and Close. The MarketSite Tower, located at 43rd and Broadway,features a high-tech electronic display that wraps around the cylindrical NASDAQ building, providing up-to-the-minute financial news, market highlights, and advertisements. The MarketSite Tower is featured in films, television programming, and news articles. You can check it out live starting at 3:45 on Monday, August 29th at http://www.nasdaq.com/about/marketsitetowervideo.asx.

Stop into Hopeworks on any given day this summer, and you’ll find youth (some of the 30 Hopeworks trainees who are earning stipends this summer) with handheld GPS units walking out the door as they work to map North Camden. Our volunteers and trainees will offer you some squash, tomatoes or greens from the Esperanza Community Garden around the corner, and chances are, if you are following us on twitter, you know all about our foodspotting flourish.

So check out the articles below to catch up on all of the energy and excitement that is going on this summer at Hopeworks ‘N Camden!

Hopeworks staffer Sean Dougherty and three trainees – Ruben, DJ and Geehem, set off for Mexico on August 5th to do 5 days of service with a non – profit in Cuernavaca, MX. The non profit called VAMOS! works with poor children and families by proving education, meals and health care in 12 different colonias around Cuernavaca. For more information on VAMOS check out their website at www.vamos.org.mx. Our group will be working with the VAMOS! computer labs as well as helping to feed and teach some small classes. This group will also be scheduling tasks and opportunities for a return trip to Cuernavaca around Christmas. This is the first step in what is hoped to become a long term relationship with the youth of Mexico! Keep them in your prayers and follow them at #hwmexico on Twitter

As part of our summer theme of healthy foods, Hopework youth have been involved in foodspotting all around Camden.  Youth are looking for healthy meals in Camden restaurants and have been reaching out to local bistros, grills, dining rooms and cafes. Trainees make arrangements to have a chef show us how they prepare and serve an item on their menu.  They are learning about how the ingredients and preparation contribute to it being as heathy and fresh as possible and then get to taste it! Yum! Finally, Hopeworks has connected to Foodspotting.com to post pictures and reviews of each these dishes, sharing their opinions with people all over the world.  You can check out some of the reviews at www.foodspotting.com/hopeworks. And thanks to all of the cooks, restaurants, waiters, and waitresses who have helped us discover healthy food in Camden. Stay tuned as we name the healthiest dishes in Camden this fall, and follow our progress by searching for the hashtag #healthycamden on twitter!

Hopeworks staff and trainees have made the move to twitter this summer and we want to follow you! You can follow us at @hopeworkscamden or if you want to follow our healthy food discussion try #healthycamden. Our Mexico Service trip followers go to #hwmexico.  Here are some of the recent tweets that have tweeted by:

This summer the Esperanza Garden and C.R.I.B. have hosted a series of Community Cooking Demonstrations. We kicked the summer off with Fidencio, owner of Lupita’s Restaurant in Camden, coming to share with us how to use our fresh garden veggies to make quesadillas, burritos, and other really tasty food. We also discovered how to make zucchini bread- which was a big hit with the trainees and staff at Hopeworks. We’ve also made bruschetta and gazpacho from our tomatoes, and some watermelon and strawberry slushies! Next up we are learning how to can our own spaghetti sauce, using our tomatoes and fresh herbs from the garden. It’s been fun to see vegetables straight from the garden be put to use in the kitchen with some delicious recipes. To learn more about our cooking project follow #healthycamden on Twitter

Members of the Hopeworks GIS team are out and about this summer in North Camden. They are collecting parcel data for a collaborative project between Hopeworks and Cooper’s Ferry Development Association. Equipped with their GPS enabled hand-held computers and orange vests, they are visiting each of the parcels that make up North Camden. The team determines vacancy, use, and an estimate of condition. The team is also locating community spaces and finding empty lots. Ruben, a veteran of the GEB team at Hopeworks, is the youth leader for the project. Each day, Ruben prepares the equipment, plans the team routes, and connects with the team on questions and issues that pop-up in the field.

With our focus on healthy food in Camden this summer, all Hope Through School youth are working on short documentaries about various aspects of healthy food in their lives. With subjects ranging from healthy hamburgers to community gardens, Hopeworks filmers are interviewing nutritionists from Cambells Soup, chefs from Virtua Hospital, and gardeners from all over Camden as they research, write, form their own opinions and find their own voices on this important topic. They started out by polling themselves on different topics and creating their own 45 second films. Check them out on our YouTube channel and follow us at #healthycamden on Twitter.

Tuesday August 23rd at 7 pm Hopeworks is teaming up with SCRIBE to present Street Movies at Northgate Park. Featuring the premiers of our summer health food documentaries and other short films about food and Camden, the night will feature garden displays and healthy exercise demonstrations.

Our entrepreneurship program has moved into the second stage, where we now have five youth working together to write business plans in order to receive seed money to test their ideas. They have already worked collaboratively to test their hands at canning produce grown in our garden and are working on integrating healthy living and eating into their final proposals. Look for more good things to come throughout the summer.

To begin our summer where youth are learning about social media and healthy living, we visited WHYY in Philadelphia to learn how they gather the news and then edit and produce it for radio, the Internet and television. We had an excellent tour hosted by Anna Shipp, who coordinates WHYY’s volunteers and interns. Our trainees also learned how they might intern with WHYY after college. Our trainees appreciated the great information they learned as they embarked on their own summer projects.

In the heat of the summer, in a field hard by the Cooper River, armed with bats, balls, frisbees and food, teams of trainees and staff, young and old, took to the fields of competition in the Third Annual Hopeworks Field Day! They found glory, they found triumph, but most of all they found fun as teams battled in kickball, volleyball, ultimate frisbee, tug of war and softball. It was a great day of friendly contests, good eating and lots of smiles and laughter. Congratulations to everyone who was a part of this historic event!

Symantec Week – With Visitors from Symantec coming in from California, St. Louis , Philadelphia and North Jersey, our end of the summer celebration will be bigger and better than ever!  Follow all of the activities at #hwsymantecweek on Twitter! SCRIBE Street Movies will present some films made by our youth on August 23rd. Our Community Training, open to everyone, (Click here to register) will focus on twitter and safe data back-ups. We’ll be checking out a Riverhsarks game and then heading to North Jersey and NYC on the 25th, when we will tour the Alcatel-Lucent HQ in Murray Hill, NJ, Wall Street and NASDAQ! And to top it all off, Hopeworks will be ringing the closing bell on NASDAQ on August 29th! Look for us online, on TV and on the Big Screen in Times Square!

Thanks to Deviant Art, The Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis, and Sheila Cavanaugh in Philadelphia for donating art to the C.R.I.B. community this past month!  Deviant Art is a platform that allows emerging and established artists to exhibit, promote, and share their works within a peer community dedicated to the arts.  This online social network for artists donated nine framed prints to the C.R.I.B. which you can find hanging up on our first floor.  Already these paintings have sparked some great discussions.  These photos, paintings, and wonderful pieces of art have helped to create an atmosphere of creativity and beauty.

Thank you to Fr. Rick Comboy and Fr. Terry Dempsey, SJ, head of MOCRA for having art sent to us all the way from St. Louis- two original pieces that we are glad to display.

Sheila is a local artist in Philadelphia who was happy to share a beautiful piece featuring a sunflower, which has brightened up our kitchen.

Please let us know if you are interested in donating a piece of artwork– we would love it!

After a year as a DeSales Service Works volunteer I am leaving Hopeworks but not leaving Camden. I have spent part of my time here meeting youth and telling them about what Hopeworks has to offer. Recruiting for Hopeworks has been a pretty unique experience. I often handed out flyers in neighborhoods with volunteer groups. This simple action of meeting people where they’re at yields rewarding interactions. I’ve worked with trainees at all stages of Hopeworks: from meeting them on the street and telling them about our program, to tutoring them during literacy sessions, and hanging out with CRIB youth. By seeing youth go through the program from beginning to end, I can really see the tangible impact the Hopeworks’ staff and I have on their lives. My plans are to continue working in Camden with DeSales Service Works. I will be doing various community outreach activities in North Camden, and am especially looking to get involved more with the abandonment issue.

Father Jeff, Tarren and John will be heading out to San Francisco on August 29th for a week of training at the annual Dreamforce conference. Dreamforce is where salesforce.com highlights its latest innovations and teaches its users and developers how to get the most out of its products. Since salesforce.com is the backbone of Hopeworks’ record-keeping, internal communications, and project management, we hope to come out of the conference with new ideas, new skills, and a better understanding of cloud computing.

Residents on Grant, York, and 6th Street are preparing to plant trees in front of their homes, as well as some decorative trees around the garden, in October. On the 8th of October the New Jersey Tree Foundation will be joining Hopeworks and Community Residents in a day of tree planting and celebration. We’re looking forward to closing down the block and putting everyone to work, as well as enjoying a BBQ to celebrate. Stay tuned for more information because we’ll be looking for people to join us and volunteer. Trees will be a welcome addition to the neighborhood. The NJ Tree Foundation shares that trees improve air quality, add beauty, provide shade, save on energy costs, absorb rainwater, and increase property value.