Hope College's NEA Big Read Lakeshore program began in 2014. Our goal is to create and foster a culture where reading matters. We bring our Lakeshore community together around a common book and use this shared experience of reading, discussing, and exploring the themes of the book as a springboard to listen to and learn from each other. Our trademark program takes place annually in November. Partial funding for our Big Read program comes from the NEA Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in partnership with Arts Midwest.
Ways to Get Involved
Read the book
Our book's topics and themes are timely and relevant.
Attend our events
Our events offer a variety of perspectives, experiences, and angles on the book.
Interact with others
Our goal is that you listen and learn from others as well as sharing your own ideas and experiences.
Respond
Our community becomes stronger when you make positive changes in response to your interactions with the book.
Land Acknowledgement
Together we acknowledge that we gather, in West Michigan, on the traditional land of the Peoria, Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe Peoples, past and present.
We honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations.
As a community, we recognize the ever present systemic inequities that stem directly from past wrongdoings. We are grateful for the ways in which stories and words can speak truth and shed insight to these inequalities and wrongdoings, and also provide a way forward towards equality, justice and understanding.
Through these Big Read events and beyond, we commit to respecting and reconciling this long history of injustice, and commit to be better stewards of this land we inhabit.