Urban Hope: A Summer Programme To inspire resilience

Urban Hope was the natural name for our summer programme this year. It is neat from a branding perspective but more importantly centers our key mission to help every young person find a hope and future. This driving vision has existed since the conception of Urban Pursuit, we are an alternative learning provision founded on hope. Urban Hope falls at the end of an academic year that has been especially challenging for Bristol schools, where in the face of several tragedies the needs in our city and among young people here have been amplified. We wanted to respond as a local organisation and have designed a bursary funded summer programme for some of the schools most directly impacted by knife crime.

In term time, Urban Pursuit provides the young people we support with positive mentoring relationships along with new experiences of success. Along with this, many of our cohort develop a deeper sense of worth and meaning. This summer we seek to do the same for 18 young people across the city, providing them with engaging and exhilarating adventure activities. A launch event will kick off the programme of three high-energy days, run fortnightly through the summer holidays, all wrapped up with a celebration event at the beginning of next academic year.  The programme aims to give the young people an opportunity to talk about their experiences, beliefs, attitudes, hopes and fears – all whilst getting active and having fun!  This will provide additional opportunities for support, care and excitement over the summer break.

We know it has been a hard year to discern and find hope, though there are perhaps tentative reasons found in the way people have responded in the wake of these events. From a personal perspective of working at Urban Pursuit, I have found that engaging with and absorbing the ethos of the team has initiated hope in me. I had begun to grow cynical, unconsciously believing that hope was not a cause of action but was a panacea sidestepping the real work.  I thought that hope was the luxury of those with easier lives, not a necessity for all of us.  I’ve come to see that this cynical view was in fact a luxury itself.

The Hebrew word for hope is closely linked to ‘expectation’, associated with the image of a rope or cord.  This helps with an understanding; hope is something to pull on and to get traction. Its transforming internal power can be seen manifest in the remarkable resilience and creativity of everyday people showing up for one another. It is not a refusal to deal with hard realities but the insistence to keep dancing and working towards better. To begin to transmit hope to our young people we need to have hope on their behalf.  I don’t know for sure if it is contagious every time, but they are worth it every time. Here at Urban Pursuit there is a growing wellspring of examples where young people have found hope. Here is to a summer of doing the same for more young people and trusting in the ripples that will make in their lives.