Hope on the Rize is a writing and short film project that builds upon classroom learning to create an immersive and transformative experience for all participants. It leverages the humanizing power of poetry and creativity to build community, empower youth visions and voices, and bridge classroom learning and real-world impact.

" Hope on the Rize aims to transform apathy and disengagement, awakening and sharing the parts of our lives, from the tiny to the huge, that make evident our interconnectedness and capacity for change.  It asks people to come as they are, share what they love, discover new aspects of identity, and participate in telling a new story of what’s hopeful and what’s possible."

– Dr. Elizabeth Miller
Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Pseads

Activating Hope in the Classroom

Projects are designed and activated in a collaborative and integrated way, enhancing student learning. Our educational design team partners with educators to understand grade-level academic priorities and classroom culture considerations and to overview the arc of learning that year across history, science and English. Leveraging these insights, and based on an archive of more than a decade of customizing standards-compliant learning journeys to classrooms, we design tailored projects that complement, expand upon and amplify current grade-level and classroom learning experiences.

The first phase of Hope on the Rize projects highlights new ways of thinking and taking action and invites students to further explore their own perspectives through conversation, poetry and reflective writing. Students are then taken step-by-step from an initial creative idea to a final short film that conveys something they value or a powerful message about a change they want to see activated in our world.  Projects culminate in a classroom or grade level “film festival” in which communities, often including parents, are invited to hear students present their films and watch the powerful stories that have been created from this unique immersive learning experience. To expand the ripple effect of student voices, Pseads plants one tree per project completed.

Every Vision and Voice Matters

The power of Hope on the Rize goes well beyond incredible completed works of poetry and short films. Students build fluency in academic and real-life skills. They develop a wide range of narrative techniques and skills, from poetry and other forms of reflective writing to scriptwriting and storyboarding to video and sound editing. Students also grow critical self-expression skills, such as active listening, organizing thoughts, speaking with a point of view, and how to move from an idea to a completed project with a clear and compelling message.

Along the way, transformative changes occur. Students grow confidence and self-agency as they develop new skills, passions and ways of looking at the world. They are empowered to embrace and accept that each person has a unique perspective and voice in the world that needs to be heard. Energy shifts from curiosity to hope to desire to be and create the changes they want to see in the world.

The Inspiration and Legacy

Hope on the Rize is built on a literacy, science and writing curriculum developed in community with students and teachers over the last decade, using poetry as a vehicle for uniting these subjects. The conversations that unfolded in classrooms were filled with inspiration, humor, joy, and insight, as well as concern for people and the planet.  With its freedom from rules, and celebration of both uniqueness and shared experiences, poetry acts as a catalyst for overcoming fears and revealing connections.  The more we experimented, the more we found that the rhythmic and open nature of poetry enables new kinds of focus, listening and problem-solving, and ignites creativity.  From the most eager writers to the most reluctant, every person is an equally capable poet.

Poetry is humanizing and transformative.  Inspired by our friend and mentor, Dedan Gills, and poets and scientists across the centuries, the Pseads programs are founded on the notion that even more than something that can be written or spoken, a poem is a way of being.  A poem is an attitude that can be brought to every moment so that the wonder, compassion, cooperation, and creativity that human beings are capable of rises.  Dedan would say that every person is not only a poet but a poem.  From this hope-filled message, and the learnings across a decade, Hope on the Rize was born as a way to extend the possibilities even further and inspire a bigger movement that invites everyone’s participation.

With his wife, educator and social justice advocate Belvie Rooks, Dedan imagined championing the poetry in every person, advancing human dignity, and supporting social and environmental healing through tree planting ceremonies, with trees as emblems of community and transformation.  Inspired by Dedan and Belvie’s humanity, legacy and example as tireless advocates for a just and healthy world, Hope on the Rize aims to inspire a million poems, a million projects, and a million trees (one planted for every project completed).

Hope on the Rize was also deeply informed by the life and legacy of Susan Lambert, whose photography, writing and visual art is a celebration of a commitment she lived every day to “find the extraordinary in the ordinary.”  Her vision inspired Pseads to take the journey of self-expression even further, transforming poems and writing into impactful visual and multimedia narratives that reveal new possibilities and leave a bigger mark on the world.

Learn more about Dedan, Belvie and Susan.

Sample Projects

Hope on the Rize is produced by Pseads,

in collaboration with Growing a Global Heart and Children For Change.