Past Present

Artwork by Rita Stern, one of the co-founders of The MY HERO Project.

When we started MY HERO our children were in elementary school, OJ was in the headlines, the tabloid culture was just hitting its stride. Everybody was claiming fifteen minutes of fame, and our celebrities were famous for going to parties. We wanted to provide our children with an alternative to the “heroes” popular culture was throwing at them. We wanted them to realize that everybody has the capacity to contribute to society, and that real heroism usually involves hard work and an open heart.

When we started working on MY HERO the internet was still relatively new: It was our hope that this new medium might work for this unsung hero storytelling initiative. We believed that if we build this platform others who were like minded would help us grow this community, and together we could lift people’s spirits and connect them in celebration of the better angels of our nature and to elevate hard working, extraordinary people who quietly make a difference everyday.

We also wanted kids to have a way to be heard, to participate in this new medium while thinking about who really deserves their respect, and why. This was before Facebook and You Tube, so the idea of kids having authorship of stories published on the internet was still new. How to make it user generated, how to allow kids to work on a story over time, to come back to it, to upload photographs to their stories….were tools of self expression that we were figuring out how to implement online so that kids of all ages in classrooms around the world could create and publish their own MY HERO web pages.

That was 15 years ago. MY HERO has grown steadily over the years, now incorporating the MY HERO film festival and global events, conferences and teaching workshops. The dedicated team that works under Jeanne’s steadfast direction are the beating heart of MY HERO. It has been their hard work and commitment that has expanded The MY HERO Project into a truly global exchange.

Now, for some of my favorite stories: first of all, the first stories my children contributed. My son Ben wrote about Anfernee Hardaway, his favorite basketball player at the time. Later, when he discovered jazz, he wrote about Charlie Parker. In the process, he learned about them and himself. My daughter Olivia took up Stephen Sondheim (we listened to a lot of musicals in the car!) and my other daughter on Dr. Seuss (whose books we read every night before bed.) Some other stories I loved were the ones that introduced me to someone new: Dr Ben Carson, Ilse Bing... My favorite section is the film festival with such stories as the New York Sky, a hand-drawn animated film in which one feels the human heart beating, the need to create and the transformative power of art.