At HC2, speakers find hope in Ironman, art, Ukrainian resilience, and Emily Dickinson

Hope was the topic at the sixth Harvard Community Conference, HC2, a program organized by a Bromfield student and featuring local speakers, held April 1 at the library’s Volunteers Hall. As described by J Woolcock, originator of the forum, its purpose is to “spark discussion about diversity and the different contexts within which our identities come into play.” The goal is to see what new perspectives people can find when they leave their comfort zones.

Since its beginning, the student organizer of HC2 has worked with Arm in Arm, Harvard’s town organization committed to fostering diversity, with Ellen Sachs Leicher as their mentor.

This year, Bromfield junior Lauren Stoller was the first non-senior to lead the conference. Later, she told the Press that in the past the conference counted as a senior’s community service project, a graduation requirement at Bromfield. But criteria for the project have changed, and HC2 no longer qualifies for credit. Stoller was a speaker at last year’s conference, and when no senior had come forward, Stoller volunteered to keep the conference going.

Stoller said she chose hope as a topic to counteract the “bombardment of negative headlines” and to “keep positivity in times of turmoil.” She brought coffee and homemade baked goods, which decidedly reinforced her mission.

Jen Schoenberg and Lauren Stoller prepare Schoenberg’s presentation at the Harvard Community Conference, where speakers shared their thoughts on the theme of “hope,” Saturday, April 1. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

To help others, sharing a life story

The first speaker, Jen Schoenberg, was known to many in the audience as a Harvard firefighter and an outreach worker at the Council on Aging. But she was there to talk about the difficult topic of suicide and the role it has played in her life. She said she was persuaded to speak because she believes telling one’s life story may make a difference in helping others.

Schoenberg’s first exposure to suicide was when she was 3 months old, the youngest of five children, and her father took his own life. Her mother remarried, and the family moved to a small town in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, where her parents ran a general store. Schoenberg was a three-sport varsity athlete, and she “went all out” for every team she was on. She attended the University of Vermont on a track and field scholarship and after graduation moved to Boulder, Colorado. She was persuaded by friends to train and run a marathon. “It was a long way from the long jump to a marathon”; she thought her toes would never recover, and she vowed she would never run another.

In 2005 she and her husband, Jon, and three kids settled in Harvard. One night, two years after their settling, her father called. “Debbie went to heaven,” he said. She had died by suicide. Her sister Debbie had been a social worker at a veterans hospital, and Schoenberg knew about her frustrations and all the red tape she had to go through and how stressful and emotional the work was. Her husband later said he had noticed changes in Debbie, but she hadn’t wanted anyone to know how troubled she was. Not too long after Debbie’s death, her husband died by suicide.

Debbie had always admired and encouraged Jennifer’s athletic abilities, and now Schoenberg, despite her earlier vow and how busy she was with other things, trained and entered a half Ironman triathlon, for Debbie. That was the first of many, and her goal was to make it to the World Ironman championships in Hawaii—and then she could tell Debbie’s story. “I trained and raced for my reasons,” not for the competition, she said, and her Ironman successes qualified her twice to race in Hawaii, in 2012 and 2014.

In the summer of 2015, while cutting a watermelon in her kitchen, she dropped a knife on her foot, severing the tendon connected to the big toe. The six weeks of pain and isolation were hard for someone used to being constantly active, and it brought her to an understanding of how bleak things can appear and how easy it is to fall into depression. The experience strengthened her resolve to encourage people to ask for help and to start the hard conversations that can bring help to others.

Her work with the COA and her more recent calling to join the Fire Department put her in positions to help. For prevention of suicide, said Schoenberg,“Help starts with you and me.”

Finding hope in art

The next speaker was Cynthia Fontaine, Bromfield art teacher. In addressing “How Art Influences Hope,” she defined hope as belief in the possibility that “there could be something else.” She gives assignments that ask students to explore their feelings and the things they value and to express those in their work. Their art is their voice. During her talk, she showed slides of several pieces of student work.

The assignment to create a large poster entitled “All About Me” gives students the opportunity to gain confidence by voicing their strengths, their possibilities. One student made a collage depicting all the different pieces of herself; another boldly expressed their commitment to Black Lives Matter. The project of making an identity mask, where one side is the inner you and the other the face you show the world, allows students to become more self-aware and voice their complexities.

Shifting from student art, Fontaine showed a picture of the well-known Obama “Hope” poster that was part of the former president’s election campaign. And she quoted Michelle Obama’s words, “Make decisions based on hope.” For Fontaine, hope lies in possibilities.

A lesson in resilience

Roksolana Mykhaylyk, a native of Ukraine, has lived in Harvard for seven years, and although she very much likes the community, she said, “I think a lot about my native country and hope for victory in war.” She talked about hope in the context of her grandfather’s and her brother’s resilience in war.

The Ukrainian resilience may be surprising to the rest of the world, she said, but not to the Ukrainians themselves. She described something that helps to understand that resilience. All Ukrainian children memorize a poem by one of Ukraine’s most famous writers called, in Latin, “Contra Spem Spero”—“Against all Hope, I Hope.” Mykhaylyk recited the poem in her native language, showing her lasting commitment to this belief.

Her grandfather Ivan was a farmer and a beekeeper in a small town. At the age of 30, in World War II, he was drafted and sent to a Polish village. He was deployed to other places in three more military operations, and he survived them all, despite the odds. In one instance, his experience was so terrible that he shot himself in the arm, then helped another soldier to the hospital, from which Ivan was sent home only to be called back to the Soviet Army. He continued to call on his own resourcefulness and to support his family at home. Finally, in 1946, he returned to his village, where he lived to be 91.

Taras, Mykhaylyk’s brother, was a professor and author of textbooks for schoolchildren when in 2022 he joined the army to oppose the Russian invasion. A slide shows a firearm dominating space on his desk, overshadowing a textbook. He has hope that Ukraine will survive and children will go back to school and read in Ukrainian, not Russian. He wrote another textbook while serving in the army, and it has been published. “ ‘Contra Spem Spero’ still resonates in the hearts of many Ukrainians,” Mykhaylyk concluded.

The new Bromfield principal, Kim Murphy, was unable to attend the conference but had sent a tape to Stoller. She read Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins, “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words  / And never stops at all.” For Murphy, the poem is a reminder that hope is free and ever-present and asks nothing of us except that we remember it exists.

She said that during the pandemic, her neighbors hung “hope” signs on their porches, and looking across the street at those signs helped her to have hope, too. She wanted her reading of the poem to be a reminder that, despite it all, whatever happens, hope endures.