Chris Hope, MDiv ’11

“We believe that young adults have the answer to the underemployment and unemployment problems in their community. And they do; they have the answers. I think the program is proof of that. The credit goes to them.”

Chris is an HDS alumnus whose Cambridge-based workforce training program The Loop Lab launched in October 2018. The Lab offers audio-video recording and editing services to the community, and holistically mentors young adults from the Cambridgeport community.

Hearing the Voice of God

I am originally from Atlanta, GA. I was born and raised in the metro Atlantic area. My dad was in the military for many years during the Vietnam war, after he left the military he started working in IT, as well as my mother. They moved to Atlanta in the ‘80s when it was a burgeoning city for young professionals, and then they had my brother and myself. I was exposed to the sciences and arts there. Atlanta is this thriving audio scene, from college sports radio to the music scene with hip-hop, rap, and pop. I grew up in that environment.

I came to the Boston area around 2002, after graduating high school to attend the TYP program at Brandeis. I then transferred to Tufts to pursue an undergraduate degree. My interest at that time was biomedicine. I had, and still do have, a very analytical perspective, and I wanted to pursue research science. I did experienced research while doing internships through Tufts. I spent a year abroad in Hong Kong, where I studied traditional Chinese medicine from a Western perspective. In the states I was working with Charlestown Harvard/MGH on a Type I Diabetes project, and another year I did an HIV vaccine project.

I’ve always been into STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics). It wasn’t until 2008 after graduating from Tufts and actually working in the field that I started to think differently about my career path in a nonlinear way. At that time, I thought to myself I was going to move on and pursue a masters and even a doctorate.

Then suddenly, I had a near death car experience around that time, which was one of those experiences that really created an existential crisis for me. I went from Saul to Paul in that moment, from being agnostic to, in my perspective, hearing the voice of God. I wrestled with it until I couldn’t wrestle with it any more. I pursued a program at HDS in 2008. I was grateful to be accepted, and I pursued the master of divinity degree and then went straight into ministry. I’m the type of person where, if I’m going to follow a path and make a decision, then I’m going to do it all the way. 

Opportunity Divide and Mentoring

What I’m doing now with the Loop Lab is a direct correlation to my time at HDS. The things that I learned there are really phenomenal. In my clinical internship, I was working in a local parish in Cambridge. That particular parish is in the middle of the Cambridgeport neighborhood. Up to that time, I had never heard of the Port. If people aren’t familiar with it, it’s this community enclave that is segmented between Harvard and MIT, on the river side of Mass Ave. Before, when I thought of Cambridge, I thought of Harvard and MIT: wealth, innovation, biotech development. You don’t necessarily think of project developments or low income families, or the local small drug trade, unsolved murders, and under and unemployment.

The church that I served was right in the middle of all of that. I was managing the church’s outreach and offering ministry services, and in that kind of work you hear the stories that a lot of the young mothers and fathers in the community have: concerns for their children (some of whom are young adults) and running the streets and getting involved in crime—some going in and out of jail. Coming from eastside Atlanta, that’s not a new phenomenon, but you can imagine how jarring it was at least for me, coming into the city and seeing so much wealth and opportunity and then seeing that there was this demographic of the population that was left out of opportunity. There was an opportunity gap.

At the same time, while at HDS and Harvard University at large, I was doing a radio show called Hip Hope Radio, which was on WHB 95.5 FM. I would have Dr Cornel West, Rakim from Eric B Rakim come on the show, and we would talk about politics, hip-hop, the intersection of faith and politics, and hip-hop culture. During that time I said to myself, “Is there an opportunity for me to mentor some of the young adults in the Port and bring them to the radio show?” Because many of them were SoundCloud rappers, aspiring musicians, and hip-hop artists, so studio time is a valuable carrot for many of them already.

In addition to that, they could learn some easily translatable skills on how to work Pro Tools or how to put a production together from start to finish. So a few of them would come to the show and see how the show was produced. They had to understand that you have to do research before you interview someone and be well-prepared, and other things like that. A few of those young adults have gone on to do other things, and I was able to connect them to services with the city through the church that I was doing clinical internship work with at HDS.

Cambridge Arts has been very supportive in asking if I had considered creating something that could be more formal and funded, and fast-forward a year later and here we are. We started grant writing, and I insisted on using the design model method, and I brought in a lot of the young adults from the community to all of our meetings to help inform the curriculum and our mission. 

Loop Dreams

We are going to be training five young adults from the ages of 18-26. They will have some kind of relationship with the Port neighborhood. Either they’re from the Port, or frequent visitors, or they’re hanging around, but they’re going to have some kind of commitment to that area, because the Port is our focus, at least for the first year or two.

Our mission is really geared towards empowering young adults to enter creative and digital economies through job training. Many of these young adults feel they are surrounded in the Port neighborhood and beyond by so many opportunities in the creative and digital economy, yet they lack many of the resources and education.

There are many barriers preventing them from gaining access. Some of them bring with them some incredible skills to the table. It’s just that sometimes, by working in corporate spaces, they can benefit from a more holistic education. It’s more than just teaching technical skills; some of it is conflict resolution, working your way through micro-aggressions that occur on the job, being a person of color or someone from the LGBTQ spectrum, and working with mediation skills. There are so many different things that we’re teaching in addition to the audio-technical skills to this first cohort. 

The way that we’re doing that is we’re partnering with other agencies and organizations that have a great track record. The month of October we partnered with Eastern Bank, which has a long commitment and history of financial literacy education. So they will be teaching financial literacy to our young adults. Another partner is the Red Cross, where we’ll get the young adults CPR training. Many of them are probably going to be or have been exposed to violence, and knowing what to do in the midst of an event like that could save a best friend or a family member or loved one’s life.

Other internship partners that we have, like WBUR, are really committed to ensuring that this is a success and are offering to teach some of the curriculum, so we are really excited. Because who better to teach content creation and radio and podcast 101 than an organization like WBUR?

That is year one. Every six months we’ll be enrolling five students. The first cohort began October 15, 2018, and will go into March 2019. We had a lot of interest in this first round, which is a good problem to have, but it made it difficult for us to decide. I will say that we really wish we would have had more female applicants. I’m not sure if it is a cultural thing, but if we could figure that out and have thought parties about that that would be great. Obviously, women audio engineers and sound field workers are underrepresented group. Even when you talk about the “sound guy” or the “sound man,” already it’s a gendered term, so that tells you what we’re going up against. There are other organizations that are working on this already. Sound Girls is a phenomenal national organization. We’re in that struggle with them in trying to talk with young women and encourage them and help them understand that STEAM is also a field that they should consider.

Loop Lab, Moving Forward

I like the idea of the program staying at a small number, because we are really about quality not quantity. I think five is a good number because we can really tailor the content to people’s professional interests. Ultimately, the services that the Lab is going to provide to the community will be much broader. We are going to be providing low-cost professional recording services to the greater community, so if you wanted to record a podcast, you could do it at an hourly rate. Another opportunity is that we’re going to be providing audio editing services, not only for individuals but for non-profits, so that could include commercial work or podcasts. We’re already getting requests, which is exciting. We’re going to be doing other things, and I think it’s important to include the trainees in those opportunities as learning experiences, and ultimately I would love to see us be in a position to hire some of our alumni to be able to take on some of those functions. Obviously, a hope of mine would be to branch out to other cities. This could provide an incredibly innovative model for work-based learning that just hasn’t been done in quite this way with a holistic curriculum.

Active Engagement

At HDS I studied Christian ministry, but everyone has to study pluralism, too. So I also studied Sunni Islam, which was really impactful for me. Reading the Qur’an and being exposed to Muslim culture was really powerful. Whether Christian, Wiccan, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, etc., whatever your background was, we were all learning something from each other. That active engagement is more and more what the world is lacking. It’s something that I carry with me in my own personal life, but also active engagement with the Other is something that I think is so critical to the learning here at the Loop Lab. Trainees should not judge each other, or know what backgrounds people are coming in with, or make assumptions; they should assume good intentions from folks. That’s something that I think unfortunately with the current political climate people are starting to lose civility and starting to forget that we should lead with questioning—that was another thing that I learned at HDS. Don’t assume, but just lead with questioning. If you’re curious, there’s nothing wrong with asking questions about “why do you believe that in particular?” and going from there. And trying to make those questions independent from any judgements.

I think it’s really powerful to be able to create a safe space in that kind of way. That has made me long for such a safe space in my professional life ever since graduating from HDS. I’ve worked in corporate and non-profit spaces after HDS, and you won’t find it as much there. I am really blessed to be in a position now to try to emulate and recreate that kind of a space with the Loop Lab, which is a learning community. We’re going to be learning together, growing together, and there are some guidelines. Part of that is being engaged with learning and the Other. Even if you don’t agree with someone’s viewpoint or whatever might be in their background, there’s something that you could learn that might make your life even better. We should be focusing on the commonalities rather than the friction.

Our application for Loop Dreams, which is our workforce training program, is available on the website www.thelooplab.org.

Interview and photos by Anaïs Garvanian