Our Mission
Hands for a Bridge provides high school youth with opportunities to explore issues surrounding social justice in their local, regional and international communities. In collaboration with established partners, students engage in intensive artistic dialogue to build bridges of understanding across chasms of race, culture, wealth and poverty. These student leaders will emerge as transformed global citizens with vision and resources to affect vital change in our world.
Here at Home
One of the accomplishments of HFB is an established class in the daily schedule at Roosevelt High School. Hands for a Bridge is not solely about travel; it is about dialogue, how express and, more importantly, how to listen. Students meet daily as scholars, artists, teachers and activists. The course focuses on aspects of social justice, using the arts and literature as lenses through which critical questions may be examined. Some of these essential questions are:
- What issues shape conflict and division?
- How are identities formed?
- What separates us?
Each semester groups of students work on projects to enhance community understanding regarding such questions including an English Language Learners partnership and a high school exchange in attempt to unite Seattle’s Public High Schools and establish a diverse community of youth leaders outside Roosevelt as well.
Abroad
South Africa
Home stays with families from Langa, a former township just outside of Cape Town, and attendance at Isilimela Comprehensive School are essential components of Hands for a Bridge. Additionally, students are housed with families from Bellville High School in Bellville, a formerly "whites only" suburb of Cape Town. Through the Hands for a Bridge program, students from different cultural, racial, and economic backgrounds meet, laugh and create new pathways through art, music and poetry.
Northern Ireland
In 2005 Hands for a Bridge began a connection with Hazelwood College in Belfast. In 2007 and 2009, Oakgrove College in Derry/Londonderry hosted our group and reciprocated with a visit the following fall. Both these Colleges are Integrated schools, open to both Catholic and Protestant students, in a country where education has been divided. They face the challenges we face, to communicate across divides in people. Our shared mission is to outreach to others, to find common ground through the arts, to open up dialogue and to resolve conflict peacefully.
Our Partners
Comparative History of Ideas (CHID), University of Washington
CHID seeks to provide students with the tools of critical and parallel thinking, enabling them to consider intellectual problems from many perspectives and ultimately transcend conflicts through dialogue and understanding. CHID students are often involved in Hands for a Bridge events and projects.
Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
As part of its ongoing mission to provide opportunities for international dialogue in public schools, JSIS is a vital curricular partner, generously providing speakers, facilitators and venues to assist in the critical dialogue essential to the Hands for a Bridge mission.
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