Hi, my name is Erin. Welcome to my blog. Im a grade 11 high school student in Canada. I just finished a project about hope. We talked about hope, resilience, survival, and adversity. We learned what makes a story of hope and talked about different stories of hope.

Resilience

Resilience is adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, being able to bounce back after a hard time. It’s the ability to withstand or overcome adversity.

Adversity

Adversity is misfortune, or continued difficulty. To overcome adversity is to to overcome a difficult time or situation, or to overcome something when the odds didn’t seem in your favour.

Hope

Hope is wishing something will work out the way you want it. To have trust. To have hope in the future, or hope that it will be okay.

Survival

Survival is to continue to live after a life threatening situation. To survive something that isn’t easy to survive. To survive is to just live, but to be a survivor is to have hope and resilience, and overcome adversity.

What makes a story of hope?

To have a story of hope is to have a story of overcoming adversity, surviving, showing resilience, and having hope for the future. In class we learned and talked about how in a story of hope you can’t have one trait without the other. To have hope is to have a reason to overcome adversity, be resilient, and survive.

Hope Within Communities

We researched many different story’s of hope and were told to make a video about hope. I chose to show hope within communities and share three different stories. These are the stories of Hope within communities.

Sonia Ellis

Sonia Ellis was the late studio owner and artistic director of Seymour Dance in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Sonia was someone I knew personally. She taught me and many others dance. She not only taught me dance and technique, but she taught me important life lessons and shared her love for dance. Sonia believed anyone and everyone deserves to experience the joy of dance. She created a loving community. Sonia was diagnosed with brain cancer and passed away in 2018. The community came together in a way I’ve never seen before. Everyone supported one another, we celebrated Sonia’s life, and created a scholarship in her name. Her legacy and story lives on at Seymour dance.

Texas Tower Shooting 1966

On August 1, 1966 there was a shooting at the University of Texas Tower in Austin the perpetrator fired at the public, both within the main building Tower and from the Towers observation deck. He shot and killed 15 people, and injured 31 others. Officer Billy Speed was shot by the perpetrator at the top of the clock Tower. The community show support to speed and his family, as speed gave his life to protect the community.

Oklahoma City Bombing

On April 1995 Timothy McVeigh parked rented truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. Inside the vehicle was a powerful bomb. Many people, adults and children, lost their lives.

This is a link to the video I made on these stories of Hope Within Communities.

Learning from the stories of hope and overcoming adversity is finding hope within a community. To have hope as a community is to be there after and during tragedies for one another, to help each other overcome adversity, to support one another, and to carry on The stories and legacies of those we love.