Andrea Stark
Andrea is an educator, a writer and an activist and has been in education teaching diverse, multiethnic and multicultural populations for over 15 years. She has worked with both economically challenged and special needs children teaching writing, acting, visual art, communication, cultural awareness and peace. She has been a personal advocate and activist for individuals concerning housing and fair treatment, an activist for community organizations, and for well known non-profit organizations concerning education, animal rights and government policy local and national in her country. She has created curriculum for city programs, colleges and secondary education level schools, and youth theatre companies including her own. She is particularly adept at tailoring engaging and meaningful exercises and lessons for specific populations.
The philosophy that she brings to Niño’s is based in a vision of peace and focuses on the betterment of children’s lives through education and experience. She believes that lack of education breeds not only poverty but anger and hopelessness and that real education and true learning occur best when the student sees with their own eyes and feels with their own hands concepts such as hope and peace. She believes that the Niño’s program has the ability to help children rise above poverty by showing them the alternatives, modeling for them the actions one can take to create a path out of poverty and by providing them with the ideas and the opportunities necessary to take those actions. She also believes that the single greatest power that a child in an unfortunate situation can possess is hope. She believes Niño’s program fosters hope through action and philosophy.
She states, "Children have the power to believe in many impossible things, they can imagine that they are birds flying and free, there is no reason they can not imagine their lives as that free and full, we simply have to show them. Then we can watch them fly."
