Who We Are

Hope Is Education is a global learning community growing together.

Hope Is Education was founded in 2008 by Jayeon (Nature) Park.

More than an NGO, Hope Is Education is a global learning community that has grown through relationships across cultures, generations, and borders. For nearly two decades, teachers, students, parents, community leaders, researchers, donors, and practitioners have learned alongside one another while exploring a shared question:

How does meaningful educational change happen?

Rather than beginning with solutions, Hope Is Education has evolved through a series of questions. Each question led to new experiments, new partnerships, and new ways of understanding education.

What started as a personal search for belonging gradually became a collective journey of learning and growth.

As a first-generation scholar from a low-income family, Nature spent much of her twenties feeling that she did not quite belong anywhere.

In 2007, everything changed when she met the Rendille people of Korr, a remote pastoralist community in northern Kenya.

For the first time in her life, she experienced a profound sense of belonging and unconditional hospitality. Adopted into a Rendille family and given the name Koreeya—“a girl who belongs to Korr”—she began to ask new questions about education, community, and the future.

What started as a personal search for belonging would eventually become a twenty-year inquiry into how learning, relationships, and collective agency grow—from a classroom, to a school, to a community, to a district, and ultimately to a regional ecosystem.

Hope Is Education was founded in 2008 as a response to questions that emerged from Korr.

Working alongside teachers, students, and community members, we explored how education could contribute to the long-term future of pastoralist communities facing rapid social and environmental change.

During this period, Hope Is Education launched a series of interconnected initiatives, including:

STIC (Short-Term Intensive Course for School Teachers)
HEART (Higher Education for African Teachers)
ICT in Education initiatives
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)
Community-led development initiatives
Korr Agenda 21

Through these experiences, we learned that sustainable educational change depends not simply on infrastructure or resources, but on teachers who continue learning, growing, and leading change within their communities.

We also began to understand how African teacher learning and educational change emerge at the local level through the interactions among teachers, classrooms, schools, and communities.

The most important outcome of this period was not a project.

It was a question:

How do African teachers learn and grow?

Building on lessons from Kenya, Hope Is Education began working in Northern Uganda in 2015.

While Season 1 focused primarily on understanding African teacher learning at the level of teachers, classrooms, schools, and communities, Season 2 expanded this inquiry to the district level.

The central question of this season was not simply how African teachers learn and grow, but how they learn and grow together across schools, communities, and district systems.

Drawing on both field experience and a growing understanding of global and national education policies, Hope Is Education worked with teachers, schools, district education officials, inspectors, local governments, parents, and communities to strengthen collaborative professional learning across Northern Uganda.

This work led to the development and expansion of the School-based Learning Community (SLC) model, a contextualized model of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) designed for rural public primary schools in Northern Uganda.

Over the next decade, SLCs expanded across public primary schools and eventually became part of local education policy through the Omoro District Education Ordinance in 2023.

Beyond teacher learning, Hope Is Education also experimented with a wide range of initiatives related to parent livelihoods, community participation, school health, menstrual health and hygiene management (MHHM), literacy, numeracy, and foundational learning.

Some initiatives generated stronger results than others. Together, these experiences reinforced an important lesson:

Sustainable educational change cannot be achieved through a single intervention.

It requires understanding how teachers, families, schools, communities, and local systems interact over time.

During this period, we learned that African teacher growth is not simply an individual process.

Nor is it confined to a single school.

African teacher learning is shaped by relationships, institutions, policies, and systems that connect educators across schools and communities.

The most important outcome of this season was another question:

How do African teachers learn and grow "together"?

For nearly twenty years, Hope Is Education has explored African teacher learning at multiple levels:

Teacher → Classroom → School → Community → District

Today, we are asking a larger question:

How can the learning, relationships, and leadership of individual teachers become a shared asset for an entire region?

To explore this question, Hope Is Education is developing the Teacher Learning Ecosystem.

The goal is not simply to support individual teachers.

The goal is to nurture Teacher Changemakers and create the conditions through which teacher learning, collaboration, and innovation become Collective Intelligence that benefits an entire region.

While working with schools and communities across Northern Uganda, another challenge became increasingly urgent.

Despite major gains in school enrolment, Uganda continues to experience lower primary school completion rates than several neighboring East African countries with comparable income levels.

Research suggests that dropout is not caused by a single factor.

Rather, it reflects the interaction of household vulnerability, learning challenges, school conditions, community support systems, and the broader educational environment (Kakuba, Nankinga, & Golaz, 2025).

This led us to a new question:

How can schools, families, communities, and global partners work together to ensure that every child completes primary education?

To explore this question, Hope Is Education launched the Zero Dropout Initiative.

School. Home. Community. Global Solidarity - United to End Primary School Dropout.

The Zero Dropout Initiative is built on two core ideas.

Parents as Education Partners

Parents are not simply beneficiaries of educational support.

They are active partners in children's learning and school development.

School–Community Safety Nets Based on Shared Responsibility

Hope Is Education views education as a shared responsibility (Young, 2006).

Schools, parents, communities, individual supporters, and corporate partners all contribute different assets toward a common goal: ensuring that every child can remain in school and thrive.

In this model:

Schools provide local leadership and ownership.
Parents and communities contribute time, labor, knowledge, and local resources.
Global citizens and corporate partners contribute financial resources and long-term solidarity.

Together, they form a global community of shared responsibility that strengthens the local systems, relationships, and resources needed for children to stay in school and succeed.

Although they focus on different groups, both initiatives are grounded in the same belief:

Sustainable educational change emerges through relationships, shared responsibility, and locally rooted systems.

Together, these two initiatives represent Hope Is Education's ongoing effort to learn, experiment, and grow alongside African teachers, children, families, and communities while exploring how

collective intelligence and shared responsibility can strengthen the conditions for sustainable educational change in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Hope Is Education is a global learning community growing together.

Teacher Learning Ecosystem	Zero Dropout Initiative
Teacher Changemakers	Parents as Education Partners
Collective Intelligence	Shared Responsibility
Knowledge Assets	Community Assets
Regional Ecosystem	School–Community Safety Nets
Teachers Thrive Together	Children Thrive Together