The Field of Hope: Where a Neighborhood Gathers

Ask most people to picture East Palo Alto and, if they picture it at all, they tend to reach for the wrong image. They think of headlines from decades ago, or of the freeway they take past it on the way to somewhere with a bigger name. What they do not picture is a field on a bright Saturday, full of the sound a neighborhood makes when it is at ease: a basketball ringing off a rim, little kids chasing each other across turf, folding chairs pulled into a circle, someone's music, someone's laughter, the smell of food that means somebody's family is nearby.

That sound is not an accident. It was built on purpose, by a lot of hands, on a piece of ground that people around here decided was worth reclaiming.

What is the Field of Hope?

The Field of Hope is a renovated community field on the Hope Horizon campus at 1001 Beech Street. Planning began in 2019, the work continued straight through the disruption of the pandemic, and the finished space opened in October 2021. It is not a single thing. It is a set of invitations laid side by side: a basketball court, a multi-use turf field, a picnic area, a walking path, and a gathering circle built around a campfire ring. Along the edges, dozens of new trees and more than a hundred plants went into the ground, the kind of detail that says a place is meant to last.

It came together the way good things tend to come together in East Palo Alto, which is to say collectively. The court was made possible with help from the Jeremy Lin Foundation, started by the Palo Alto native and NBA player, whose foundation covered a majority of the cost of the basketball area. When the space finally opened on October 10, 2021, more than 230 people showed up to celebrate it. That fall, the California State Senate issued a certificate of recognition for the project. A field, honored by a legislature, because everyone involved understood it was never really about the grass.

Why does a place like this matter so much?

It is tempting to treat a field as a nice extra, the landscaping around the real work. That gets it backward. For a child, a safe and welcoming place is not the decoration around belonging. It is the thing belonging needs in order to exist at all.

Child development researchers have spent years circling the same quiet truth. The Search Institute, which studies what actually helps young people thrive, describes what it calls developmental relationships: kids do best when they are known by steady, caring adults, when someone expresses care, challenges them to grow, and expands their sense of what is possible. Harvard's Center on the Developing Child makes a related point about the earliest years, describing healthy development as a back-and-forth between a child and a responsive adult, a serve and a return, over and over. None of that happens in the abstract. It happens somewhere. It needs a table, a court, a circle of chairs, a Tuesday, a place a kid can come back to and find the same faces waiting.

You cannot mentor a child you never see. Relationships need a place to keep showing up, and a place is exactly what a neighborhood gathering spot provides.

This is why the field is not a break from Hope Horizon's mission. It is the mission with room to breathe. The reading tutoring, the robotics builds, the summer camp, the mentoring, all of it depends on kids and adults being in the same place often enough for trust to grow. A gathering spot turns a program into a rhythm, and a rhythm into a relationship.

The two cities, and one field between them

You cannot talk honestly about a place in East Palo Alto without naming the strange geography it sits inside. This is Silicon Valley. Some of the wealthiest companies in human history are a short drive away. And yet, in the local Ravenswood City Elementary School District, only about 12 percent of students scored proficient or above in English on the state assessment in the 2024-25 school year, against a statewide figure closer to 49 percent. Roughly nine in ten Ravenswood students come from low-income families. The gap between the two cities is not a story about talent. It is a story about opportunity, and about access to the ordinary things other neighborhoods take for granted.

Green space is one of those ordinary things. A safe court to play on, a clean field, a spot to hold a graduation or a cookout, these are the kinds of shared resources every neighborhood deserves, and that too often get built everywhere except where kids need them most. The Field of Hope closes a little of that distance. It puts something beautiful and useful and free right where the kids already are, and it says, in the plainest terms a place can say anything: this is yours.

A Saturday, imagined but true to life

Picture a girl, maybe eleven, who comes to the campus after school for tutoring during the week. On a Saturday she is back, but not for a program. She is back because her older cousin is playing a pickup game on the court, and her mother is at the picnic tables with two other families, and the little kids have discovered the walking path makes a perfect racetrack. She does a lap of homework nobody assigned, just to sit near a volunteer she likes. She shoots a few free throws badly and laughs about it. By evening someone has lit the campfire ring and the circle fills up.

Nothing measurable happened that day. No test was taken, no skill checked off. And yet everything that makes the measurable things possible was quietly at work: a kid who feels safe, adults who know her name, a place she wants to return to. That is the soil the outcomes grow out of. Pull up any success story from a place like this and you will find, underneath it, a hundred unremarkable afternoons in a spot where a child felt she belonged.

What keeps a gathering place alive

Here is the part that is easy to miss. A field is not finished when the ribbon is cut. A gathering place stays a gathering place only as long as there is something to gather for, and someone to keep it open, mowed, staffed, lit, and safe. The court needs the camp that fills it in July. The circle needs the mentors who show up in October. The turf needs the robotics team that spills onto it after a long night of building, and the reading program that runs inside all winter.

All of that costs something, and none of it charges the families what it is worth. About 120 students come through Hope Horizon's doors on a typical day, and the point of the whole place, the buildings and the field alike, is that the door stays open regardless of what a family can pay. That is a promise, and promises like it are kept one gift at a time.

Forty years in, this is what Hope Horizon has learned about East Palo Alto: the talent was never missing, and neither was the will. What a neighborhood needs is a place to put them, together, in the open, on the same patch of ground, again and again. The Field of Hope is one such place. Keeping it full is the ongoing work, and it is work anyone can share in.

Common questions

What is the Field of Hope in East Palo Alto?

It is a renovated community field at 1001 Beech Street, opened in October 2021, on the Hope Horizon campus. It includes a basketball court, a multi-use turf field, a picnic area, a walking path, and a gathering circle with a campfire ring, along with dozens of new trees and plants.

Who helped build the Field of Hope?

It was a community effort, with planning beginning in 2019. The Jeremy Lin Foundation helped install the half-court basketball area and covered a majority of that cost. More than 230 people attended the opening on October 10, 2021, and the California State Senate issued a certificate of recognition for the project.

Why does a shared gathering place matter for kids?

Research on child development, including the Search Institute's work on developmental relationships and Harvard's work on caring adults, keeps pointing to the same thing: kids thrive when they are known by steady, caring adults and feel they belong. A safe, shared place gives those relationships somewhere to happen, week after week.

How can I support the Field of Hope and Hope Horizon?

A shared space is only as alive as what happens on it: the tutoring, camps, robotics, and mentoring that fill Hope Horizon's calendar. A gift helps keep the programs running and the field open to the neighborhood. You can give through our ways to give page.