📚❤️ Hope for Chicago

"I am smart. I am worthy. I am enough. I am a leader."

No, you're not back up at our daily mantra section (though, maybe that should be this week's😉 ). 

This simple, powerful phrase is what the Chicago Morgan Park High School Principal Femi Skanes asked the student body to repeat at their recent assembly.

• After having the students repeat it until they believed it, Femi shared the news that would change the course of their lives forever: the entire student body would have the opportunity to go to college completely debt-free. 

🏫 Bringing Hope to schools... Hope Chicago is a nonprofit organization led by former Chicago Public Schools CEO Dr. Janice Jackson. Thanks to the company's impressive fundraising efforts, students in five Chicago high schools now have college in their future. 

• The team at Hope Chicago visited each of the five schools last week to announce this inaugural opportunity – and the reaction from the students was priceless.
• “It’s just different when you tell somebody directly, when you look them in the eye and make that promise it just feels really different," Dr. Jackson said of the assemblies.

🎓 Just wait. It gets better... Hope Chicago is changing the lives of the students' parents, too. 

The organization's multigenerational scholarship is one-of-the-first of its kind, offering tuition payments for graduating seniors and their parents – as long as the child is enrolled in university full-time. 

• Most students come from immigrant families and are at/below the poverty line, meaning parents often can't afford higher education.
• Hope Chicago's goal is to help these families support themselves so they can eventually come back and help others in the community. 

📣 The big announcement... When it finally came time to share the news with the students and their families, principal Juan Carlos Ocon of Little Village at Benito Juarez High School said the energy was palpable. 

• “The auditorium of more than 500 students and parents exploded with energy, hopes, and dreams. You could see the tears in the eyes of our students and parents.”

📝 Bottom line: Between the five schools, thousands of students now see their true potential. 

• “I hope to see them being successful by chasing their dreams, being successful by accomplishing things they are passionate about and being successful by investing back into their community,” said principal Femi Skanes. 
• “That's one of the most important things to me that I told them — success is not just about what you gain, success is what you gain to give back to others.”