The Opportunity Before Us: Real Hope
As our national crises unfold, we confront an historic opportunity that only you, many others, and I can seize: generating real hope—or as I like to call it, authentic hope.
In response to the four crises we face—COVID-19, economic turmoil, systemic racism, and political breakdown—foundations, corporations, and other groups are all running into the void offering more funding and more resources to various causes and groups. All good. And yet these alone will not enable us to seize this moment.
In fact, it would be easy for us to blow this moment by simply embracing new language and adopting new programs but never fundamentally shifting our mindset, behaviors and practices. Consider the following:
Governor Andrew Cuomo has mandated that each community in New York State come up with a community-driven plan for reimagining public safety.
In Clark County, Kentucky, where the Institute is a partner, over 60 organizations come together every week to figure out shared responses to COVID-19.
When I spoke with more than 50 school superintendents from across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, they wrestled with how to respond to students having to learn from home.
In Jackson, MS, we just launched an initiative to mobilize the community to seize this moment, take more shared action, and generate a can-do spirit.
The good news is that in so many communities (including those I just mentioned) we have witnessed ordinary citizens, small nonprofits, neighborhood groups, and many others, along with larger institutions, coming together to forge innovative solutions to current challenges. Indeed people from all walks of life are demonstrating a belief I have long held: we have far more existing capacities in our communities than we routinely see and tap into.
When it comes to creating authentic hope, we have to ask ourselves: will we show up differently? Will we engage, work and learn together in a new way? Will we turn outward toward our communities and truly understand what matters to people? Will we tap into people’s innate capacities to marshal our shared resources? Will we align large-scale actions with human-scale actions? Will we rethink our roles and relationships in communities? Will we forge more productive norms for getting things done together?
Or, will we simply do what we usually do after a crisis: produce new comprehensive plans, devise more complex and mechanistic responses, and spend more of our scarce money, only to fail to create real, meaningful change? Will we fail to show up differently? In other words, will we blow this moment?
There is so much hurt and pain and suffering in our society today; we must never turn away from this. Every individual deserves dignity. We must see and hear each person. We must make room for each of us to be part of something larger than ourselves.
Let us seize this moment by showing up differently. Let us each be agents of real hope.