Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (25 page)

She was appalled at what she found. There was graffiti on the walls, trash in the hallways, dog hair lining the cafeteria floors, and the financial forecast was bleak. What was once a community hub was now a ghost town: it seemed as if only those who had nowhere to go remained. Saddest of all, it looked like the seniors had given up. Still passionate about the mission and purpose of this organization, Sandy put the launch of a start-up on hold and prepared to go to work. But first she knew she had to “reengage the seniors in the ownership of their beloved center.”

Here is her account of a regoaling session with some very angry clients:

I had about 70 infuriated people in the room, with much shouting and cane waving—all directed at me. It had been a long time since I was publicly afraid for my safety, but I soldiered on and they got the picture. Once they settled down, I shared the financial data and my hope for the future. Then I asked them what they wanted for the center, what their goals might be and asked them to work with me to achieve them. What do you hope to see for the center? What
will the center look like in 5 years? What is your vision for the center? What programs would you like to see here? How would you like to help?

I was very clear that it was
their
center and that I was their agent. I promised to keep them abreast of the financial and political picture, and they agreed to work with me to return the center to its glory days. I kept the focus on the future and only addressed the vision that I knew was possible. I wanted to make sure that they were going to work hard to improve the center and after the tenor of this initial meeting, I was pleased that they were passionate.

Hopeful leaders like Sandy rise to the occasion when they are needed most. They are straight shooters whose honesty creates trust and helps us build a new version of the future.

No matter how high it is, our individual hope sometimes gets bottled up by powerful personal or social forces. That is when we most need hopeful leaders. Their hope becomes a public resource for tackling the problems we face.

When we are at our lowest point at work or school or in our personal lives, hope is a force multiplier. It can turn even a tiny amount of energy into mojo for the future. Nothing good happens when we are demoralized. The leaders who care about us most know this. That’s why they work so hard to give us a glimmer of what’s possible. And
that
is why people follow them.

W
HEN
I first started to bring hope programs into public schools, I wasn’t sure how much students would benefit. But I was certain that our hope team could engage the kids and get them thinking about the future. So when a handful of high school freshmen were tuned out and a couple seemed flat-out annoyed by us, I had to figure out what was going on.

I went quietly over to Steve, a longtime classroom teacher, who seemed to have a good connection with the students. I was curious about one boy in particular. “What’s up with that kid? Why’s he blowing us off?” What Steve shared rocked me: “You guys are talking a lot about the future. I think he would say he doesn’t have one. Some of his cousins and friends died before they hit fifteen. He says he is living on borrowed time.”

This student—I will call him Carlos—lived every day the way my former VA client John did in those terrifying days after his medical diagnosis. Carlos saw himself as a boy with no future. Why should he
spend an hour a week talking about something he didn’t have? I realized that our first job was to reconnect Carlos—and a few other students in his class—with a believable future, and as quickly as possible. Our team would need to make a special effort with those students, helping them trade a fast-life strategy of reacting and spending for one that relied on planning and investing.

Steve also touched on a struggle that many more students were having. “Even those who believe that they have a good future ahead of them—they don’t see how school will help them get there.”
Whoa!
As we know from Destin and Oyserman’s study in the Detroit middle school (see
chapter 5
), this connection between school and who and what we want to be when we grow up is fundamental to the success of our children. This became another key focus for the hope team, and I believe that it is the central challenge for our educational system today. We have to help students see that school is relevant to the future they want for themselves.

I’ve now spent almost two decades researching hope in young people.
Since 2009 I have measured hope in more than one million students through the Gallup Student Poll. I have worked with thousands of America’s most hopeful teachers. And I have taught hope programs to children of every age. I now believe that to teach hope to our children, in and out of the home, we need to do the following:

Link children’s current thinking, efforts, and learning to their future lives.

Teach children specific, multiple pathways to meaningful goals.

Conduct community audits to preserve and recruit extra agency for children.

But there’s a caveat: These three tactics work only if the young person is already connected to the future. And that connection, in turn, is created if, and only if, a child has at least one caring, hopeful adult in
his or her life, and if the child is excited about at least one thing in the future.

Being close to a caring, hopeful adult paves the way and prepares the heart for hope. All children are not born into loving families, but even one caring adult can buffer a child from the pains of the past and the fears of the present. Only with that support and protection can our youth invest in the future. Only with the help of a caring, hopeful adult do our young people have the luxury to imagine a better future.

I’ve known many teachers, counselors, coaches, and mentors who became the primary caring, hopeful adult in children’s lives. But even when children are well supported at home, anyone who works with them needs to convey hope to make sure that the next generation is in hot pursuit of the future.

Children also need something to hope for. They need to be excited about one thing in the future . . . then another, then another. That one thing can be big or small, novel or run-of-the-mill, close at hand or far in the future—as long as it teaches them to look forward with positive expectation. The content hardly matters (a weekly visit to the park, a family trip, a sporting event, a school dance) as long as thoughts about it are energizing to the young person. Lessons about pathways or agency don’t stick unless they’re aimed at something meaningful.

Another thing: In most cases, that one exciting thing, that thing that gives hope a spark,
can’t be assigned by the adults
. That exciting thing can be
uncovered
by caring adults only as we are getting to know the young people in our lives.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since we, the adults, don’t like it when someone assigns us a task, either.
No middle school student wakes up squealing with glee, “I get to raise the school district’s reading scores today!” No college student in America jumps out of bed and says, “Today, I will do my part to raise the graduation rate at my school!” They don’t care about our institutional goals. They are excited about personal goals that create a promising future for themselves. Our job is to do all we can to make sure that the present readies them for it.

In most school systems, education has a relevancy problem. Students are picking up on the fact that they are being prepared for a twenty-first-century world with a twentieth-century curriculum. According to the Gallup Student Poll, only half of Americans students, grades five through twelve, say that their teachers make them feel that their schoolwork is important. Perhaps due to school reforms hyperfocused on assessment, relevance has been swapped for efforts to increase rigor and accountability.

Whatever the cause, education no longer addresses a deep “felt need” among students. Many students just don’t hunger for what today’s schools provide. They don’t see how education will fix any of their current or future problems. That needs to change. It
can
be changed. And it can be changed quite easily.

What if students consider today’s work as an investment in their future self? The more (and earlier) we prime students to make connections between their college-bound selves and their K–12 selves, the more they invest in hard work today. Furthermore, the effectiveness of Destin and Oyserman’s brief psychological intervention (
chapter 5
) suggests to me that we should use such small interventions more frequently (as the benefits are real but short-lived) rather than building big school reform or youth development programs that use massive amounts of time, energy, and money we can’t get back.

Here are some ways my colleagues and students have connected students of all ages to their future:

Fantastic Future Me.
Developed by the Omaha Children’s Museum with the help of Gallup and Phenomblue Labs, Fantastic Future Me is an interactive computer tool that helps children ages three to eight imagine themselves in a future career. When a child walks up to the buzzing, whirling display, it snaps a head shot and then prompts her to try on one of twenty careers ranging from archeologist to video game designer. The child selects from dozens of clothing items and tools
(some children try on every single accessory before choosing) to complete their future image. They then email, text, or print out the image, which is accompanied by a basic description of the educational path that would take them from their present to their future job. The Future Me message, sent to Mom, Dad, a favorite teacher, or some other caring adult, can kick off more conversation and exploration of a particular career path.

Mentoring for the future.
The TeamMates Mentoring Program is a one-to-one school-based mentoring model that pairs school-age youth in Nebraska and Iowa with adults in their community. One hour of mentoring per week gives the mentor and the mentee plenty of time to talk about the hassles of the day and the possibilities that the future holds. In a partnership with Gallup and the Clifton Strengths Institute, TeamMates developed hope cards that nudge the mentors to link school to life and prime this discussion about the future. Together, adults and students come up with new ways to solve current problems and clear the way for goals that excite them. The mentor then sends a hope postcard to the student’s school or home to remind the student of the next steps to his or her goal.