Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (28 page)

At the depths of the Great Recession, after many depressing months of unemployment and a nudge from his girlfriend, Michelle King, Seth decided it was time to put his diverse talents developed as a concierge to use. He would offer his services to people in need in their Portland, Oregon, community and organize other volunteers through his website,
http://wevegottimetohelp.blogspot.com
. Within sixteen months of the site’s launch, more than a hundred WGTTH volunteers (most, like Seth, people who had lost their jobs) provided assistance with nearly four hundred projects ranging from moving furniture to painting houses and building fences. WGTTH provides no financial support and accepts no payment, except to ask that recipients “pay it forward.” Reams says, “One of the biggest things we offer is hope.”

Seth’s good works and hope network buffered him from the demoralization of long-term unemployment. It may also have given him the initiative he needed to invest in one of his entrepreneurial ideas. In 2010, Seth and Michelle decided to turn their hobby, making feed for backyard birds, into a business. A month after they put up a website, their product was in eight stores. A year later, their revenue was up 300 percent. “I love what I do. . . . I couldn’t ask for anything more.” When we emailed about his current path, Seth’s enthusiasm for the future just jumped off the computer screen. “It has been a wild ride and we look forward to the future.”

Corporate America has realized the real and marketing value of hopeful support.
McDonald’s leveraged hope in a 2011 TV campaign that highlighted how a portion of the money from each Happy Meal
purchased was donated to the Ronald McDonald House, a charity that provides a place for families to stay as they care for their hospitalized child. These commercials, with adorable children looking for a thing called “hope” in the iconic McDonald’s box, suggested that hope is real and that it can be shared with other children.

My favorite example of how a business can spread hope through its advertising, products, or services comes from Tide, the laundry detergent company that is part of Procter & Gamble. Tide sponsors the Loads of Hope program, supporting communities that have been devastated by tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Tide realized that a family’s need for clean clothes becomes critical in such a crisis. They would help preserve the dignity of people who have lost so much by providing a simple but much-needed service.

Loads of Hope was launched in November 2005, in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation along the Gulf Coast. Tide built a mobile trailer packed with thirty-two energy-efficient Frigidaire washers and dryers and coordinated a team of American Red Cross volunteers who, along with Tide employees, spent days washing, drying, and folding clean clothes for families trying to bounce back. In five visits to the Gulf Coast (in response to both Katrina and Hurricane Gustav in 2008), Loads of Hope staff washed 13,871 batches of laundry for 10,950 families over the course of fifty-nine days.

Then in 2010, when a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti, Tide partnered with Operation Blessing to help survivors. A Port-au-Prince hospital, devastated by the quake, needed just about everything, but third on their wish list, right after clean water and radiology equipment, was laundry services. In response, Loads of Hope sent ten washers and ten dryers to the National Hospital and the Zanmi Beni orphanage. The washer-dryer sets at the orphanage freed up staffers, who had been washing clothes by hand, enabling them to provide additional care for more than forty special needs children.

Back in the United States, after Hurricane Irene hit the eastern seaboard in September 2011, Loads of Hope went to the coast, working
in towns such as Cobleskill, New York. “Hurricane Irene has unfortunately left many without access to clean water, power, and the ability to clean their clothes,” said Sarah Pasquinucci of Tide. “We hope that by restoring the basic need of clean clothing, we can help give hope to those who need it most.”

Of course, thousands of nonprofit organizations also provide instrumental support to devastated communities, but today there is a growing debate about the long-term effectiveness of some interventions. What kind of help not only alleviates the immediate problem, but also increases the self-sufficiency (or agency) of the recipients? In other words, can aid be designed to create a hope contagion?

Heifer International, which provided Tererai Trent with support early in her educational journey, links donors to people in need through a “catalog” of gifts filled with smiling children cradling adorable (and clean!) piglets, chicks, goats, and other livestock that can add to the nutrition and income of impoverished small farmers. They make each gift feel very concrete by attaching it to a specific animal or “flock of hope,” even though the fine print makes it clear that the money goes into a general fund. (You cannot expect to visit your llama in Bolivia.) Their materials stress the many steps they take to make sure your gift creates pathways to a better life: “Heifer recipients receive months of training in how to care for their animal; sell the milk, eggs or other products at market; and restore the environment.” Recipients are also expected to “pass on the gift” by sharing their knowledge and animal offspring to others in their community. Donors are told, “Your generosity just sparked a cycle of giving . . . a cycle that will transform lives for generations to come. Passing on this knowledge as well as the offspring of the gift animal is at the heart of Heifer’s model.”

How do you give hope to those who need it most? Esther Duflo, a development economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is now evaluating randomized controlled studies that test how and why aid works—or doesn’t. The participants are people stuck in a “poverty trap” who seem almost immune to the help provided by some organizations.
They are so poor that other extremely poor folks see them as destitute. They don’t just need aid. They need escape hatches out of extreme poverty.

Duflo recently evaluated a program in the Indian state of West Bengal that is built on the notion that effective aid should jump-start long-term change in the lives of poor families. Judged to be unable to payback a microloan, these families were given a productive asset (that is program-speak for a cow, goat, or chickens), training to tend to the animal, sell the milk or eggs, and manage their households, and a small stipend to tide them over until the animal was profitable. This combination of choice, an asset, support and training, and a stipend triggers people to open their minds to the future rather than to spend all of their mental resources on mere survival. (And while each piece of the aid package is valuable, the support and training might foster hope. Specifically, the support ups the will to continue work with the asset and the training provides the ways to be successful.)

The results of this controlled study were compelling. Eighteen months after the program began (and some time after the training and stipend were discontinued), the families randomly assigned to receive the aid plus hope were earning 20 percent more money, eating 15 percent more and skipping fewer meals, and experiencing fewer depressive symptoms than people in the control group. Participants were also working an hour more per day than the controls, saving some money and making more plans. Overall, their income gains were strikingly larger than the value of the aid they received. Duflo’s explanation is that hope for the future paid off in investments in the present.

People who get aid plus hope work harder today. Duflo’s findings are summed up by
New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof’s observation: “Assistance succeeds when it gives people a feeling that a better outcome is possible, and those hopes become self-fulfilling as people work more industriously and invest more wisely.”

When people are stuck, overwhelmed by obstacles, and other kinds of help have failed, and/or volunteer organization or corporate aid is
not available, they may need to contract out for hope. Intrusive support, which is instrumental support on steroids, is the most active and direct assistance for someone who wants to keep moving toward a challenging goal. With their implicit agreement, a supporter establishes a contract that gives permission to “butt into” their lives to keep them on track, even when or especially when they’re ready to give up. When people show signs of not meeting their obligations, those ready and able step in and try to get them back on the right track using whatever means necessary.

Yano Jones is a master of intrusive support. He works as one of nine “talent advisors” at Avenue Scholars, an Omaha program founded to offer an avenue of success for students of talent and need from high school through community college or university, and eventually on into the workplace. He relates to the mentees in his program because their current experiences were his past experiences.

Yano’s job is to help them realize their talent and overcome the obstacles associated with growing up impoverished and without the right kind of role models. More practically, Yano does everything he can to make sure that the fifty Avenue Scholars in his care go to school every day, do their homework, stay out of trouble, finish high school, enroll in college, and earn their degree.

Some mornings Yano wakes up as early as 4:30 to drive his students to football practice, stays up late to attend a school theatrical performance, and then taxis a student safely home. Of course, Yano is not just there to ferry students from Point A to Point B. Lots of supportive chats take place when Yano transports his “babies.” He is on the front lines whenever he senses that a young man or woman is falling behind at school, encountering a major obstacle at home, or has exhausted the resources or strategies they need to move ahead. These are signals for him to step even more forcefully into their lives.

Yano told me about a student who came to him with both hope and need. “She also came into my class with an attitude like no other. You
see, she didn’t care about anything. She didn’t care about school; she didn’t care about what her mom had to say. She was going to do what she wanted to do. I have to admit, it was very frustrating at first, but I knew just as with young people that I have worked with in the past, that if you show them you sincerely care, they will show you the same, in their own way.”

Positive modeling and providing instrumental and intrusive support require us to join forces with others, and to share our future desires and pursuits. Today, new social networking tools can also play a role in mobilizing the most hopeful among us.

Yano Jones, Andy DeVries (
chapter 9
), and Rose Naughtin (
chapter 2
) are among the most hopeful people I know. I consider them charter members of the tribe of Super-Empowered, Hopeful Individuals, or SEHIs—people who believe the future will be better than the present—for everyone—and that they can make it happen. They believe that changing the world is a realistic goal despite every obstacle imaginable. They spread hope every day. Are you ready to be a SEHI?

Game designer Jane McGonigal coined the SEHI acronym in her book
Reality Is Broken
. Subtitled
Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,
it explores the power of alternate reality games to improve real lives and solve real problems. One of McGonigal’s technology-based collaborative games was World Without Oil, where more than 1,900 players and 60,000 active observers collaborated on ways to survive the first thirty-two weeks of a global oil crisis triggered when demand exceeded supply. Together they not only imagined the personal impact of such an event in rich detail, but also came up with many practical suggestions to help prevent it from happening. Other McGonigal games such as Superstruct and EVOKE (developed with the World Bank Institute) have been used as training tools for
social change. They provide ways to practice hope virtually, in the belief that we can generalize the knowledge and skills learned in the game to real life.

In 2009, when a traumatic brain injury threatened to sideline her, McGonigal decided to make a game of her recovery. Today the SuperBetter game and app allows players to customize a program to meet their medical and psychological challenges, recruit the support of allies, and find relevant scientific research. As they progress from one stretch goal to another, players are told, “You surprise yourself” and “You are a hero to others.” The game worked for McGonigal, a super-user of her own technology: “It made me feel optimistic and like I had agency.”

McGonigal’s games provide a model for how SEHIs of all kinds can mobilize followers. First, highlight an urgent problem. In a typical school or work week, we may not feel a heightened, focused demand for our contributions. A big, meaningful goal that demands attention and resources now provides that urgency. Second, provide continuous feedback. People will keep working relentlessly on a cause if they are receiving real-time feedback on their progress. Feedback also provides guidance and quick course correction when we’re trying something bold or new. Third, foster a community of trust. Common goals, hard work, and the heat of urgency forge powerful social bonds. SEHIs support and celebrate this process. Finally, remember that pursuing a big goal on a tight timeline alongside trusted friends and colleagues has a payoff that goes beyond winning and losing. That payoff is meaning.

We can see this kind of call to action following disasters, when people like those from groups such as the American Red Cross and Tide swoop in to help those in need. After the F5 tornado in Greensburg, Kansas, SEHIs in the city council used these principles and capitalized on these conditions to mobilize their neighbors, recruit the green industry, and attract support from people across the country. By creating the pathways for hope, SEHIs invent and spread their own humanitarian missions. They don’t wait around for the world to save itself.

The people in this book are kindred spirits—not just because they are hopeful, but because they have hope to spare. When shared, that spare hope goes a long way in the world today.