Today’s Class: November 21, 2014

Rodrigo Zetina-Yglesias. He’s presently the Director of Operations for the Benrus company(https://benrus.com) and the former Operations Manager of Alex and Ani. He was also an intern at the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation and has been a member of several organizations, most notably, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Rodrigo presently serves on the Board of Directors of the Rhode Island Chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. But what is most notable about Rodrigo is his goal of becoming

the President of the country of Guatemala.

Rodrigo Zetina-Yglesias (left) introduces himself to one of the Hope students during the networking session of today’s Life Skills class.

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Posted on November 21, 2014

Today’s class: November 14, 2014

Richard Quinilla Gonzalez (with arms folded in the center of the group) introduces Lexy (to Richard’s right in the picture) and Lucine (to Lexy’s right in the picture) to his Life Skills classmates

Two guests graced our ‘Life Skills’ classroom today, Alexandra ‘Lexy’ Marsh, a senior class Vice President at Roger Williams University and Lusiné Ovanesyan, a designer from Akamai Technologies, Inc. a cloud services provider headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Both women spoke about a life perspective shared. Lexy and Lusiné both acknowledged being curious and naturally comfortable trying new things, extending themselves out of their comfort zone, to discover and learn, to pursue the ‘What Ifs’ they’ d often dream about.

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Posted on November 14, 2014

First Quarter Review

Some memorable moments from the 1st quarter of Hope’s Life Skills program. BIFphoto

The first photo is from September’s Business Innovation Factory (BIF) conference at the Trinity Theatre in Providence. Students were able to listen to the fascinating stories of courageous people from all over the world on the Trinity stage. Students were also able to meet and speak with Conference story tellers and attendees during lunch and other break out sessions during the two day conference. One of the speakers Hope students were able to listen to and meet was fourteen-year-old Camille Beatty. Camille makes robots with her Dad (Robert) and eleven-year-old sister Genevieve. Last year they built two Mars Rover replicas for the New York Hall of Science. And, David Moinina Sengeh. David was born and raised in Sierra Leone and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab. At Harvard, David co-founded one of Popular Mechanics’ Innovators of the Year 2009 — Lebone Solutions Inc., a company that won $200,000 from the World Bank to produce microbial fuel cells in Africa. I encourage you to check out the BIF web site for story teller videos from the conference.

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Posted on November 8, 2014

Today’s class: 11-7-2014

Carlos Sanchez, Michelle Nguyen and Cassandro Castro. Three successful professionals working at a $129 billion dollar American company, CVS Health, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, came to Hope High School on Friday, November 7th

to share their life stories and aspirations, many of which, were strikingly similar to the some of the students in Hope’s ‘Life Skills’ class.

Michelle Nguyen (farthest left facing students in this picture), Carlos Sanchez (to Michelle’s right in this picture) and Cassandro Castro (to Carlos’s right in this picture)

Michelle shared her journey as a 14 year old girl from Viet Nam

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Posted on November 8, 2014