Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Never Underestimate the Power of Hope

When priorities clash, take a step back and look at the bigger picture

Roberta Vriesema, Representative

The woman stood up, angrily pointed across the room at me, and loudly said, “You can’t take my T-shirts! I refuse to give up my T-shirts!”

I fumed and stormily thought, “In no world would I ever let you have those T-shirts when I need the money to get marginalized women ready for the workplace!”

She and I were among about 60 people in a large meeting room in a community centre in the small city where I live. We were part of a coalition that included representatives from neighbourhood groups around the city and was led by two volunteer mediators. We were trying to divide the funds our coalition had received from the city, local police, social services, and area school boards. Our common goal was to provide grassroots “soft” social services and outreach in our neighbourhoods.

The hope was to take the money, free building spaces, and direct staffing hours offered and use them to reach people before they had problems requiring formal intervention. Having existed for over a decade, our coalition was seen as creating significant and meaningful impacts on the wellbeing of our whole city.

But when there is lots of need and limited funding, goals can sometimes clash.

While I struggled for a diplomatic response, a firm yet quiet voice spoke up from the back of the room: “Excuse me, I think we are forgetting something really important. We don’t do T-shirts or job interviews. We grow hope. This is about how we grow hope.”

The voice was that of one of my teammates. I took a breath.

As a young mother and eager volunteer who didn’t know much better, I had been chosen by my committee to be the voice at the table. I had been thoroughly coached in what our priorities were and what we had to have when we left that table—even if it took us days to get there.

I represented an area that included both the poorest neighbourhoods in our city and one of the oldest and wealthiest. The poorer areas were known for a high number of thefts, prostitution, and drug grow-ops, as well as the city’s largest number of critical social services cases. I knew this too well. On one of the first evenings in our new home, police were on our street conducting a helicopter-supported backyard search for a criminal.

At that time, I was advocating for a program to aid women “recently graduated” from a local crisis centre. The goal was to prepare them to become independent caregivers for their families. Many came from immigrant families and their difficult stories helped me keep my resolve at that budgeting table for that particular program.

My adversary came from an affluent new subdivision on the outskirts of the city. Yet, that neighbourhood group reported lots of pain and loneliness. In streets where the houses were tucked behind massive garages, children were spending their afternoons back from school, alone, and usually entertained in front of screens.

The requested T-shirts were to be worn by children in amazing after-school groups that had been developed by their neighbourhood group in association with students from the local university. Programs included robotics, theatre, geography, history, and so many more, all designed to entice kids away from their screens. Most importantly, they offered significant psychological and social services supports. There had been an increase in suicide attempts in the area, and those well-trained university students were making a difference in those numbers.

The programs were well run and, unlike in my neighbourhood, carried significant enrolment fees. The fees paid for the licenced clinicians and educators who almost gave away their services, as well as for program supplies. There simply wasn’t enough money left over to pay for shirts. But those shirts were necessary because parents considered them tangible evidence of a well-run program.

The woman wasn’t really asking for much money because she had done her work and obtained sponsorships and discounted services from within her region. The request was minor considering the importance of the results.

After my colleague reminded us that we were building hope, one of the mediators suggested we put down our calculators and take a break to consider those words.

Hope. It is one of the best things we can have as a person, as a people, as a group, and as a nation. Hope isn’t limited by budgets—even though it may be slowed down. Hope isn’t always held back by pragmatic realism, either.

Hope is what allows us to keep going when there is no other reason to go. Hope is hard to describe, can be hard to create, and, at times, it is very elusive. Yet, hope is something for which we function and live. It is a profound motivator and an underestimated power.

At the bottom of whatever you do—whether in healthcare, the service industry, construction, or manufacturing—are the hopes and dreams of everyone involved in your daily labours.

Are you in construction? What motivated the project you’re working on? Someone, somewhere had something related to hope that caused them to invest in that project.

Are you in healthcare? I’m honoured to serve my members because daily they help maintain the dignity of residents and patients. They do very intimate care because they hope that they can make life better for those they help. The residents’ families hope the care provided will be better than they can give at home.

Of course, we all work to pay bills, feed the family, and buy things we need. But why are we doing that? Because we have hopes and dreams.

If you are at all like me, it is very easy to become focussed and distracted by the minutiae of busyness and place the focus on tasks. These are important and must be done. It is normal to sometimes have those demands overtake the bigger picture.

But, that night, in that room, remembering hope caused us all to lay down our indignation of righteousness, put down our verbal weapons of defence, and stop judging each other’s ethics.

I wish I could say it magically caused the angst to go away, but with so many dreams and so little funding, we still had a lot of hard work to do before we reached a consensus.

Yet, with the refocus, we all walked away from that negotiation table respecting each other and proud of work that we did in our neighbourhoods because, in all of it, we were growing hope.

Never Underestimate the Power of Hope

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