Your Support Powers Peace & Justice Education
The House of Hope Peace and Justice Education Fund, rooted in the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., brings healing and dignity to Palestinian children living under Occupation.
For the second year in a row, we aim to raise $40,000 to sustain our Peace and Justice Curriculum, expand family programs to more schools, and use music and art to amplify children’s voices.
Through trauma-informed teaching and Peace and Justice Education, House of Hope helps children and families build resilience, claim their rights, and keep the hope of peace alive.
Our Work
Your support of House of Hope nurtures the wellbeing of Palestinian children, youth, and women caught in the crosshairs of the Occupation. Your partnership with our global community builds a safe and nurturing learning environment that heals. This healing cultivates hope to envision a new future. It’s a hope that reimagines and rebuilds, and it can only be done together, with you.
Impact
Your monthly gift nurtures children, empowers women, and shapes the future.
Speaking out for Palestine's children
Written and performed by Manar Wahhab, co-founder of House of Hope Vision School, and made possible through donations to our Peace and Justice Education fund, “Our Rights as Children” carries the voices of Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza. Through Manar’s voice, their dreams are sung aloud: roses instead of rubble, marbles instead of gunfire, freedom instead of fear.
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House of Hope News
A letter from Granada I am writing this from Granada. Until July, I lived in Al Aizariya, in the West Bank, where I taught Palestinian children the way of nonviolence. The Gospels call our village Bethany. It is where Jesus stayed with his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, where he wept with them in their grief, and where he called Lazarus out of the tomb. This summer, the violence around us grew so great that our lives were in danger, and I had to leave. Today I am one of many Palestinians forced to flee a Holy Land on fire. For years I spoke about what the Church owes the poor, the displaced, and the forgotten. I never imagined I would become one of them. So when I ask the question at the heart of this letter, I am no longer asking from the outside. I am asking as someone standing at the Church's door. Many Christians believe that preaching the Gospel is the most essential responsibility of the Church. We speak about evangelism, about spreading the Word of God, about bringing people closer to Christ. But I keep returning to a difficult question: can we truly preach the Gospel while remaining blind to the suffering and oppression of others? When Jesus began his ministry, he did not shut himself inside religious institutions or wait for people to come to him. He walked among ordinary people. He entered their neighbourhoods, sat with those whom society had pushed aside, and touched those considered untouchable. He recognised their humanity before anything else. He was the Word of God among the people even before he spoke a word. In Bethany, Jesus did not send a message of comfort from a distance. He came. He sat at the table. He wept before he acted. That is the Jesus I grew up knowing, in the place where he walked. For him, people were never projects to be converted or numbers to be counted. He did not ask them to become powerful, respectable, or religiously acceptable before he approached them. He met them where they were. This is where the Church must rediscover its calling. We cannot speak about the love of God while ignoring the wounds of humanity. We cannot preach freedom while staying silent when people are oppressed. We cannot celebrate the light of Christ while refusing to see those who live in darkness. What does it mean to proclaim the Gospel to people who have been driven from their homes, whose children live in fear, whose voices are drowned out by violence? I know now, because I am one of them. It does not begin with words. It begins with someone who comes, who listens, who opens a door without expecting anything in return. Perhaps the greatest danger facing Christianity is not that the world has stopped listening to the Church. Perhaps it is that the Church has stopped listening to the world, especially to the cries of those whom Jesus would have stopped to meet. We risk becoming like old temples: impressive in appearance, but with closed doors and unseeing eyes. In Al Aizariya, I taught children that love is not weakness, and that you can resist injustice without becoming what you resist. I still believe it. But exile has taught me something new: the Gospel is not only what we preach to those who suffer. It is what the suffering hope to find when they knock. Jesus did not come merely to establish a religion that speaks about love. He came to show us what love looks like when it walks among people. So the question for us today is not only whether we are preaching the Gospel. It is whether people can encounter the Gospel in the way we live.
It is early morning. You pick up your phone before you are fully awake. The first image is a child in Yemen, standing in the rubble of what used to be her home. Something in your chest tightens. You scroll. A flooded village. A hospital without power. A mother in Sudan holding a baby too weak to cry. By the fifth picture, the tightness has faded. By the tenth, you are checking the weather. This is not cruelty. The heart can only absorb so much before it begins to protect itself. But what begins as protection can slowly become a way of life. And so the biggest question we face in our daily lives is this: in the face of injustice, do we live with our eyes closed, or with our eyes open? Writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King Jr. said we are "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." How, then, can a person feel completely safe while a child in Gaza, Uganda, or anywhere else in the world is suffering from a lack of food, water, or shelter, or is deprived of the most basic natural rights: safety, dignity, and life? The pain of another is not distant from us. The pain of one human being is the pain of us all. Perhaps this is one of the most difficult moral tests of our lives: to reject the idea that the world is divided into "us" and "them," and to understand that political and geographical borders cannot erase the truth that we belong to one human family. And here, the power of nonviolence emerges. Nonviolence, at its core, is not simply the refusal to use force. It is a way of seeing the human being and the world. It is a deep awareness that I am part of a large global family, while at the same time being part of my own small family and my local community. It allows me to see the child whose name I do not know, in a place far away from me, as if that child were one of my own. It allows me to see another person's hunger as a wound in our shared humanity, and their fear as a moral responsibility that belongs to all of us. But seeing is not enough. Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz, warned that "neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim." To see injustice and remain silent, where we are free to speak, is not neutrality; it can become an indirect way of allowing injustice to continue. And to live in safety while ignoring the suffering of others does not mean that I am outside the problem. It may simply mean that I have chosen not to see it. Therefore, perhaps the real question is not: Can I change the world? But rather: Can I live with my eyes open? Can I refuse to allow injustice to become normal? Can I raise my children with compassion instead of fear, with questions instead of silence, and with dignity instead of indifference? Can I see the humanity of another person even when they are different from me? So how do we use the power of nonviolence? Injustice cannot survive on its own. It depends on people who look away, stay silent, and go along. Nonviolence draws its strength from refusing to do that, together. When enough ordinary people refuse to be silent, injustice begins to lose its hold. This is how people without weapons have ended wars, brought down dictators, and won rights once thought impossible. And it begins in our daily lives: in learning about the suffering of others and not letting it fade from our attention, in speaking up to our neighbors and our leaders, in supporting those who are helping, and in teaching our children that silence is a choice, and so is courage. All of this rests on a simple realization: that my life is connected to the lives of others; that my peace is incomplete while another human being is deprived of safety; and that justice is not a privilege reserved for those who live in safe places, but a shared human right. We are one family, large in its global reach and small within the circles of our daily lives. And between the two, our responsibility begins: To see. To feel. To reject injustice. And to choose the path of nonviolence.
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