Hidden Road Initiative
Mission
The Hidden Road Initiative (HRI) is a charitable non-profit organization that aims to provide educational and leadership opportunities for students living in remote villages in Armenia through annual educational summer camps, scholarship opportunities, and development projects.
Vision
Empowering villages through educational, leadership, and job opportunities with the ultimate goal of becoming self-sustainable.
Activities
HRI aims to enhance the social capabilities of village children and empower a new generation of students by providing college scholarships, running youth-led educational summer camps with volunteers from across the world, and ultimately training the youth of the village to run service programs themselves. HRI works to promote the economy and social equality of remote villages by conducting various development projects, such as renovating schools, installing computer rooms and constructing kindergartens.
History
Imagine living through a cold winter, where the snow is so heavy you are unable to leave your village for six months. There are no roads, no markets, and no doctors. All you have is your family, your home, your school and your faith. The villagers of Akhpradzor have lived through this every winter for generations. This village, isolated on the mountains of eastern Armenia, has no open roads from October to April—yet the villagers choose to stay on their land despite the circumstances: “We persevere! How can we leave our homeland, our mountain? We have to protect our country’ s borders!” says Ginevard, the principal Akhpradzor's only school.
A trip to this small, isolated village in the summer of 2009 served as a wake-up call for Nanor Balabanian, an Armenian UCSB student. She was working to make a difference in the world, and so, using her video camera as her only instrument of change, she gathered stories and interviewed the villagers. In the meantime, as the intern at the UN Development Program of Armenia, she was encouraged to go beyond filming a documentary and take action in promoting development. Balabanian designed an educational day camp, according to the needs of the village, that taught children basic skills in first-aid, English, arts, dance and computer skill. She hoped that with this camp, the students would gain skills that could help the villagers in the absence of resources such as doctors, art teachers, and extra-curricular activities.
Upon leaving Armenia, Balabanian felt it would be very important to fundraise enough money to fix the road that led to the main highway. However, her dream of helping fix the broken road soon appeared to be an unreasonable solution. After much research, she realized fixing the road would not be a permanent solution to the problem, since the heavy snow would destroy and damage the roads every winter.
In the beginning, the goal of the Hidden Road Initiative was to establish Internet connection in the remote village, thus creating a virtual road that would be a permanent and innovative solution to a key problem of the village—isolation. Internet would aid in combating poverty, connecting the villagers to the rest of the world, empowering the new generation of students by providing access to new resources of learning through e-education, promoting democratic development, and encouraging civic engagement and government transparency.
Since 2011 however, HRI has evolved to provide more educational and leadership opportunities for students in different villages through scholarship programs, development programs, as well as summer camps.
The Hidden Road Initiative currently has chapters at the University of California San Diego, University of California Los Angeles, University of California Berkeley, and AGBU MDS.
Impact
College Completion Rate: To date, 100% of our scholarship recipients have finished their college degrees or are on path to graduate university.
Computer and e-Literacy: Since 2011, one of the major focuses of HRI has been to promote computer education and e-literacy. Since then, many of our camp graduates have majored in Computer Science, or been able to find job opportunities in the tech world.
New Job Opportunities: Renovating and opening two new kindergartens created new job opportunities for young professionals in the villages of Jrashen and Tsaghkaber.
Civic Engagement: All of our projects have been facilitated through the collaboration of the local community. This partnership has empowered many young students to take ownership over the projects through leading the construction projects and facilitating the summer camps.
Young Women in Leadership: Both in the USA as well as Armenia, 95% of the leaders in HRI have consisted of women in their early twenties. This has been an encouraging and empowering number that has given many young women in both countries an opportunity to learn from one another and change traditional misconceptions about women.
Chapters
Across California, HRI has teams of committed students initiating projects and community events under HRI's central mission. To become involved in the HRI chapters at UCLA, UC Berkeley, UCSD, CSUN, and AGBU MDS, learn more and about how to contact them by pressing below:
Donate Today
We have an impact but only with your support! Donate to the Hidden Road Initiative and continue supporting our work in remote villages in Armenia and Artsakh! Some of the highlights of the past few years, made possible through your support:
- In-person summer camps in Akphradzor, Shvanidzor, and Poghosagomer (Artsakh) (Learn more)
- A successful and expanding virtual English tutoring program (Learn more)
- An accomplished cohort of college scholars and their generous sponsors (Learn more)
- A backpack project that brought together so many amazing people and took up most of our year but brought joy to kids in 90 villages (Learn more)