More than ever, global educators need pockets of hope to nurture and sustain us. These can take many forms and be a surprise encounter; sometimes we find them when we least expect it. Cycling home from the train station in Balbriggan after a busy and intense but enjoyable day at the IDEA AGM, I unexpectedly found my pocket of hope for the week and possibly the month of May.

Recent times have been difficult for those affected by racism; Bertie Ahern's awful comments, Yves Sakila killed on Henry Street in Dublin, and the Belfast riots, all come to mind.

While the headlines roll on and break our hearts, our hearts can fill to the brim more intensely when a pocket of hope comes about. So, as I cycled home on Tuesday in the summer sunshine, I was flagged down by a group of Irish 7/8-year-old boys outside a block of apartments near my house.

At a guess, their parents would have come from a place where their skin never really saw the light of day and from places where there was very little shade; i.e. their skin colour ranged from translucent white to dark, but there were much more pressing and exciting issues on the minds of this jovial bunch!

‘Mrs, do you want to buy a bracelet?’ they asked. It was the best offer I’d had all day, so I screeched to a halt with my bad brakes.

‘Yes, I would love to!’

And you would swear that they were on the Arsenal team winning the Premier League much was their pure elation of their first customer (The reaction of player Bukayo Saka comes to mind who incidentally experienced much racism).

 I was then invited to choose my colours - ‘green, red, white and black, of course for Palestine’.

‘Oh yeah said one of them, Free Palestine! But we’ve no black’.

We all decided purple would make a good replacement, and we decided on a bracelet with a P for good luck for my daughter doing her Leaving Cert exams.

When I returned albeit a bit later, my new friends’ excitement reached a World Cup-winning level just because I’d come back, and we exchanged the bracelets for the coins, and they jumped and hugged each other in triumph and decided how to divide the coins for their pockets. We think we may have also exchanged pockets of hope.

Without sounding twee, these ‘pockets of hope’ lift the heaviness of the news and the world. Those pockets cannot change what’s happened but collecting all these pockets like Sally Hayden has done in her new book ‘This is Also a Love Story’ can help us keep going and doing what we do.

It is on the back of this new book that we are delighted that Sally will join us for our Annual Conference on the 24^th of June, where we hope to collectively strengthen our skills and give radical hope for the world through Education for Liberation.

Here’s to those pockets of hope, wherever you may find them.

Book your ticket before Thursday, the 18^th of June at 5.00pm if you haven’t done so already. We look forward to sharing hope with you there!