The photographer Vincent T. Joachim and writer Eugene Stickland were contracted to facilitate the Hope Art Project in eighteen schools in the Forest Lawn area of Calgary from 2008 - 2010. The program was offered on a first-come, first-served basis. We attracted between ten and fifteen students at each of the schools. Most of the students were from ten to twelve years old.
The Project evolved over ten weeks, and became a visual and textual examination of a very deceptively complex concept: Hope. What, after all, do we mean by hope? How does hope differ from wishing? What is the relationship between hope and faith? What is a functional definition of this small word that we all seem to take for granted?
The working definition we arrived at and examined was that hope is the belief that something good can happen. Implicit in that definition is the idea that we all go through times in our lives when things could bear improvement. We hope things will get better than they are right now.