What is Art?

Hope Blecher, Ed.D. is an educator, author, artist, and community volunteer. Most recently, as an outgrowth of relocating to Sullivan County, NY, and her community volunteer projects, Hope founded Hope's Compass, a project through the Community Foundation of Orange and Sullivan Counties, cfos.org.  The link to Hope's Compass is Hope’s Compass Fund | Community Foundation of Orange and Sullivan (cfosny.org)  Donations will enable Hope to bring the Daffodil Project and the Dove-Daffodil-Dash arts project to other communities and engage people from 3-83+.  Also new, Dr. Barbara J. Smith and Hope collaborated on their new book, The Write to be Read: Informed Methods for Engaging Students as Writers, published by Rowman and Littlefield, Write to Be Read: Informed Methods for Engaging Students as Writers - 9781475873085 (rowman.com). Hope's 39 years of experiences in the classroom and in the administrative offices form the basis of her life's work, her perspective on volunteering, and her consulting. She remembers what it is like to work with students and that shines through in her preparations and the way the community projects are implemented. She looks forward to writing a children's book, perhaps in 2024. For now, she is broadening her work in the arts by writing poetry that she illustrates with collages, mixed media, and her photographs.