Ever wonder what the rest of the people in your community are like? What history lies behind each person?

Answer those questions and mix in photographs and interviews and you have the Hello Neighbor Project, which ran at Bellevue’s Odle Middle School from Dec. 14-18.

The Hello Neighbor Project started in Oregon as the brainchild of freelance photographer Julie Keefe. Keefe had moved to Portland in 1991. There, she observed a growing distance among her neighbors a growing sense that “people didn’t say hello anymore.”

Starting in 2007, Keefe and her assistant, Tyler Kohlhoff, embarked on a trip to reach out to local middle schools with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ten Oregon middle schools participated in photographing and interviewing various members of their respective communities. These pictures, along with an accompanying quote from the interview, were then distributed throughout the communities.

Originally proposed by JMarie Johnson-Kola, vice president of communications of the Odle PTSA and the mother of a current Odle student, the idea to bring what the Hello Neighbor Project had been doing in Oregon up north dovetailed with and spearheaded Odle’s initiative to increase communication between the school and the community.

Eric McDowell, in his first year as principal of Odle Middle School, aims to build Odle as a “resource broker,” a focal point that aggregates useful information about resources available to families and distributes it to the surrounding community. “The question is how do we get information out to families,” McDowell said. “We’re reimagining Odle as the hub of the community.”

This community outreach is mainly directed at immigrant families who may not be able to speak and comprehend English fluently. “Wrap-Around Services,” public services aimed at the families of schoolchildren which aim to help the families rather than only focus on strictly academic matters, initially promoted as part of the Lake Hills Elementary School’s own programs, are planned to be rolled out at Odle as well. McDowell’s plan to build Odle’s role as a “resource broker” will eventually become a subset of these Wrap-Around Services.

To that end, Odle has a new family liaison position, filled by Ernesto Sanchez, who also serves as a family liaison at Highland Middle School. As well as his usual duties in assisting any student’s family with communication issues, Sanchez was also a videographer for the Hello Neighbors Project, keeping a daily video journal of the middle-schoolers’ activities.

Yet equally as important as the role which the Hello Neighbor Project plays in the long-term plans of Odle as a cultural center was the experience the student participants of the project had. Sanchez attributed his own support for the project to the idea “you need to know who the community is.”

The combination of fun and strengthening of community ties is evident in Odle student Jonathan Harvey-Buschel’s description of the project as “kind of hang-out time, but also getting to meet people in the school community.”

Each of the teenage participants in the program had voluntarily signed up for the week-long program and each participant was expected to work for at least three out of the five days of the program.

The middle-schoolers were given a crash course in photography and were loaned a camera to use. Each person selected to be interviewed in the Hello Neighbor came to Odle. There, the teenagers took his or her photograph. From among the photographs taken, the teenagers, with the help of Keefe and Kohlhoff, would select a single photograph they believed was the best representation of the subject.

The middle-schoolers at the interview asked a wide range of questions, from “Hamburgers or hotdogs?” to “What would you do with a million dollars?” From the responses given, the circle of teenagers then chose several statements which they liked the most and felt were most memorable. The interviewee was then presented with these statements for final approval. The interviewee then wrote down the statement, which would subsequently be placed upon his or her photograph.

The photographs from the Hello Neighbor Project will be displayed at Meet Odle Night, to be held at Odle on Friday, Jan. 22 from 6-8 p.m.

The exhibition will be an opportunity for the middle-schoolers to display their artwork.

“The kids are going to know ‘I took that picture,'” Johnson-Kola stated.

Yet an even deeper purpose, one more true to the original mission of the Hello Neighbor Project is also present. As Keefe noted, this exhibit will help in “introducing to parents what the kids already know: how to get along.”

Changlin Li is a student at Interlake High School and an intern with the Bellevue Reporter. He can be reached at 425-453-4270, ext. 5060.