Credit: University Photography

A weekly winter series, "Soup and Hope," begins Thursday, Jan. 24, in Sage Chapel. Each Thursday at noon for four weeks, members of the Ithaca community working for social change will relate stories of hope. The series, which ends Feb. 14, serves as a lead-in to the Feb. 19 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, which will be presented by civil rights leader Vincent Harding.

Organizers of the series invite members of the Cornell community to bring a lunch bowl to Sage Chapel, where soup and bread will be served before the talks. Speakers and talks:

• Jan. 24: Cal Walker, Cornell's liaison to the Ithaca City School District and co-founder and executive director of Village at Ithaca, a grassroots community organization that advocates for excellence and equity in the school district.
• Jan. 31: Kathy Luz Herrera, Tompkins County legislator and a Cornell electrician, who is a proponent of living wages and literacy.
• Feb. 7: Marty Luster, who previously represented Ithaca in the New York State Assembly and served as Ithaca city attorney.
• Feb. 14: Carol Kalafatic, associate director of Cornell's American Indian Program and an indigenous peoples' policy consultant on food and agriculture.

The series was inspired by the work of Harding and his wife, Rosemarie Feeney Harding, who in 1997 founded Veterans of Hope, an educational initiative on religion, culture and participatory democracy. The project encourages a healing-centered approach to community-building and draws on the life stories of people in all walks of life who are veterans of struggles for freedom and justice.

The Soup and Hope series is co-sponsored by Cornell Dining, Cornell United Religious Work, the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy's Center for Transformative Action, the Wellness Program, the Division of Human Resources, the Employee Assembly and Gannett Health Services.