About East Nashville Hope Exchange

East Nashville Hope Exchange (ENHE) is a program for under-served children from rising kindergarten to fifth grades. We assist children in developing and improving reading proficiency while working with the family to develop skills to help their children's literacy development.

ENHE is headquartered at St. Ann's Episocopal Church. Hope Exchange is located in the heart of East Nashville, a diverse, thriving neighborhood with a large number of low-income residents. We offer both a Summer program and a School Year program.

Our Summer Program

ENHE offers intensive reading enrichment and community building through an integrated, thematic curriculum. Our small student/teacher ratio of 6:1 enables children to receive the guidance needed to prevent summer learning loss, prepare for the upcoming grade and increase reading levels.

Results
Recognized reading tests are administered both before and after the program. They have shown that almost all (about 90%) of the children improve their reading skills. Testing covers phonics, reading comprehension, sight words and fluency. 

Harambee
Harambee means “pulling together for a common purpose.” Each day begins with our version of Harambee, a morning celebration that includes chants and cheers and social skills instruction. 

Guest Readers
We invite members of our community to visit and be one of our daily guest readers. These positive role models provide encouragement to the children with stories that show their passion for reading and how literacy is foundational to their life and vocation.

Reading Activities
Our teachers implement a balanced literacy program that incorporates writing and all five essential elements of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension. 

Afternoon Projects & Field Trips
Various afternoon projects are facilitated by community organizations, teachers, and artists. These projects are connected to our theme, "My Family, My Community, My World," and provide students experiential learning in the arts and humanities.   A variety of field trips are scheduled throughout the program offering cultural enrichment and fun. These include visiting places such as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the Nashville Zoo and the Adventure Science Center.

Books for Children
Students take home a new book each day of our program. In the summer that means each child gets at least 29 new books!  

Family Engagement Workshops
Designed for family members, these sessions provide tools to make reading a year-long priority and ensure the child’s success in school. Topics include sight word games to make learning fund and how to ask comprehension questions while reading.

Tuition and Meals
East Nashville Hope Exchange has a yearly $30 registration fee per family, and scholarships are available. Nashville’s Summer Food Service Program allows us to provide nutritionally balanced breakfasts and lunches daily, plus we provide donated snacks. We enroll children in East Nashville from schools in the Stratford and Maplewood cluster areas.

Our School Year Program

In 2013, ENHE extended its programming to include a School Year Program that uses a monthly workshop model. The School Year Program provides monthly training to families that will help them support their child’s learning and allows ENHE teachers to follow student progress throughout the year. Workshops are designed to help family members support their child in reaching grade-level reading skills on a long-term basis. 

The workshops provide concurrent sessions for family members and students and a joint session at the end of each workshop where the entire family can begin implementing their new skills with the help of workshop leaders. The family sessions focus on how to develop 40 building blocks of healthy development as outlined by the Search Institute in The Developmental Assets®, such as socio-emotional and behavioral skills. The 40 assets are research-based positive qualities that influence young people’s development, helping them to succeed in life. In addition to the monthly workshops, ENHE staff interact regularly with families by phone, e-mail, and home visits. With the permission of family, staff communicate with classroom teachers to monitor student progress. ​

View Our Summer Program Results Here!