Clemente Wins the Aspen Challenge!
Eight students from Roberto Clemente Community Academy were selected to have the opportunity to be part of The Aspen Challenge in Chicago. The students who participated were Monserrat Soria, Reem Fakhoury, Sheniya Jenkins, Barbara Jimenez, Michael Padilla, Rosaly Gonzalez, Adonijah Scarlett and Tarique Williams.
In early March, these eight students and two teacher-coaches, Ms. Heuel and Ms. Sotomayor, attended the open forum at Soldier Field for an all day event. During this forum, they were presented with six challenges from various global innovators. The challenge that the students chose was to unleash peace within their community utilizing two unlikely allies. For the past seven weeks, the Aspen Challenge Team has worked to develop an initiative as a response to the challenge.
They have chosen to create an event called “Unify Division” in hopes to unify both Wicker Park and Humboldt Park. The students feel that in the city of Chicago, there is animosity between neighborhoods that has created a divide in the city. This divide has spread across various neighborhoods of Chicago and in our community, which is very prevalent between the Humboldt Park and Wicker Park neighborhoods. In order to unify the city, the students plan on acting as agents of change by creating an event that will utilize these two unlikely allies to elicit peace and abolish the stereotypes that hinders these two neighborhoods from growing to their fullest potential.
Their culminating event will consist of people from both the Wicker Park and Humboldt Park communities coming together on a common ground- Roberto Clemente Community Academy. Roberto Clemente lies on the border of Wicker Park and Humboldt Park. This event will include spoken word performers, artists, community leaders, and local vendors from both communities. This event will take place on May 7th in the Roberto Clemente Quad from 12-2 pm.
This past Wednesday, April 27th, the Aspen Challenge Team competed against 20 CPS schools at Soldier Field where they presented their solution to a panel of judges. After presenting, the judges deliberated and the Roberto Clemente students won the challenge! The students won a trip to Aspen, Colorado where they will participate in an Ideas Festival. We are so proud of our Wildcats!