Making Art, Making Friends

5th Grade Art Exchange with Ghana

A connection of a few decades allowed Trinity’s 5th Grade students to make a connection 6,000 miles away.

Children Inspiring Hope is an organization that partners with schools in the Southeast and facilitates art exchanges between the students in those schools and students in Ghana.

Trinity became CIH’s newest partner school in the 2023-24 school year - CIH’s first new partner since the pandemic.

“You're a very inclusive community, a very conscious community of all the things that we seek to do,” said CIH founder and Executive Director Amy Gaylor Nedriga. “That makes Trinity a perfect partner.”

The beginnings of the partnership with Trinity go back to Nedriga’s time as a volunteer at Camp Sunshine, a pediatric oncology camp in Georgia. Another volunteer at the camp was future Trinity parent Annie Schwartz. The two became friends and in 2006 went to Ghana, where Schwartz had previously volunteered while a nursing student.

Nedriga’s experience in Ghana gave her the idea for what became CIH. Through a connection with a Georgia school, drawings were exchanged between the two countries.

The Ghanaian children were fascinated by what they received from America, and the Georgia students were just as excited and were left wanting to know more about life in Ghana. The questions were empathetic as they wondered about such things as whether their new friends had access to books and water.

"What we're doing is creating a bridge to another culture. The world becomes smaller in a very tangible way," Nedriga said.

The school partnerships expanded and, through her friendship with Schwartz, reached Trinity’s 5th Grade. (In addition to Trinity, CIH currently partners with 5 other Southeastern schools.)

Nedriga said students treasure the exchanged art. She will come across a student in Ghana that she hasn’t seen in years “and they will stop and pull out from their backpack a piece of art they were given years ago.” She expects the same will be true of this year’s 5th Grade students.

“It's a memento of the ability to impact lives in a positive way,” she said.

Visual Arts Director Jen Rankey-Zona said 5th Grade was chosen for the partnership because students at that level can “understand the dynamics of different cultures and different ways to navigate the world.”

“The questions they ask are very beautiful and they are having really great cultural conversations,” she said. “They’re opening their eyes to the fact that their experiences are not the whole world’s.” She hopes the partnership continues next school year and that it becomes a 5th Grade experience that Lower School students look forward to.

Trinity participated in two exchanges through CIH this year. As part of the first exchange, 5th Grade discussed shared humanity and what it means to be generous and kind. Students made drawings reflecting those conversations, and CIH filmed the Ghanaian students’ reactions to receiving the Trinity art. 5th Grade watched the film when they received the first artwork from Ghana.

“What you saw on the screen and on the faces in the classroom was wonderment, joy, and connection,” Nedriga said.

The second exchange focused on water and how it is a shared - and vulnerable - resource for the entire planet. In her drawing, student Hannah Kain wrote:

"Water lets us live Life lets us love and Love helps us be."

Nedriga said she has been struck by Trinity students’ empathy and compassion in their art. “I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and it’s not common that all the students we work with are expressing such love and kindness and encouragement,” she said. “The love that I feel and see in your students is something to be proud of.”