Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (23 page)

This kind of old-fashioned, time-tested family and community support can still help you get where you want to go. Many caring adults in our neighborhoods, schools, and sports and mentoring programs see it as their job to lend hope to young people, knocking down an obstacle here or filling a gap there. Folks do tend to rally around you when your needs are made clear.

But I also know I was lucky to be surrounded by people who believed in me and in my goal. Today, when many of us live far from our hometowns, social entrepreneurs are pioneering new models for borrowing hope. Within just a few years, crowdsourcing has given us access to a vast neighborhood of millions of people around the world. I’ll describe just a few of these new ways to negotiate for the skills, resources, and encouragement you need to keep your hope in high gear.

TimeBanks.org
, with three hundred active TimeBanks in twenty-six countries, makes it easy to exchange your time, spent doing what you do best, for the time of others in your community, doing what they do best. Everyone’s time is valued alike. If I spend an hour providing math tutoring, I might exchange that “time credit” for sixty minutes of dog walking. In the words of their website, “We are all assets. We all have something to give.”

For example, TimeBanksNYC connects individuals across the five boroughs of New York City in an attempt to identify untapped skills of people in each neighborhood, develop a sense of connection and community, and promote the sharing of resources. Staten Island resident Mary Barbieri was injured while running an errand near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A few months later, she was preparing for a move to a new apartment when she became emotionally overwhelmed at the prospect of packing. She called the local office of TimeBanksNYC, and the organization sent six people to help her pack, move, and unpack. Mary was more than willing to pay it forward. “Anything they need me to do. If somebody needs a lunch and they can’t get out of the house, I’ll bring them lunch,” she said.

Crowdrise.com
, founded by Robert Wolfe and a cast of characters including actor Ed Norton, has a different focus. It helps individuals and groups raise funds to bankroll a community project or charity. Once you sign up on the website, you can enlist friends, family, community members, and all other members of Crowdrise to get excited about your cause. The website also offers many suggestions for making your appeal fun and engaging, putting the age-old power of a compelling story to work in a new way.

On my latest visit to
Crowdrise.com
, I checked out projects in the “human services” category. There I saw the faces of some celebrities (Sophia Bush, Will Ferrell, Jonah Hill), and many other people like you and me who were creating something out of nothing with the help of the crowd. Hill, an actor known for his roles in quirky comedies, was
fund-raising for Nothing But Nets, a project with a goal of sending 150,000 bed nets to villagers in the Horn of Africa—a simple, practical way of protecting people from the mosquitoes that carry malaria. This cause has multiple sponsors, but over eight months, Hill’s entry alone has brought in more than sixty-five thousand dollars and counting, mostly in very small amounts. Watch the list of donations scroll down your computer screen, and you see the power of the crowd in action.

ChallengePost.com
should be on your list if you work for a government agency, nonprofit organization, or software company that needs to generate top-flight ideas from around the world on a limited budget. This site allows you to tap into the innovation of millions of people who are more than willing to compete for the opportunity to fill your gap. Here’s how it works. First, you describe the details of your challenge. (For example, the city of New York challenged the world to develop software applications that would make the city “more transparent, accessible, and accountable,” based on masses of available data.) Next, you post a reward for the best entry. The product or idea that is judged to meet your challenge or solve your problem is then given the reward. (New York posted a reward of twenty thousand dollars and received eighty-five apps, valued at more than $4.5 million.) Communities form around some challenges, sparking discussion and more ideas for development. Innovative participants have also attracted venture capitalists.

In another example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated “Apps for Healthy Kids,” which made available nutrition data for a thousand commonly consumed foods and challenged students, software developers, and entrepreneurs to create Web-based and mobile games to teach young people how to use the information to make good choices. The aim was to fill the gap that exists between what kids know (this food is good for me and this is not so good) and what they do (I will eat a lot of this and a little of that). With prize money totaling only sixty thousand dollars, some of it donated by General Electric, ninety-five games worth about $5 million were created in response to the challenge.

Whatever your hopeful goal, you can probably find a site to support it.
Kickstarter.com
has become the go-to source for financing creative projects. DonorsChoose.org allows classroom teachers to fund projects (some very modest) that their own school or district can’t afford. Crowdsourcing literally brings the world’s resources to your computer.

Through the pursuit of individual success at school and work, we learn the how of hope. Then we lead hopeful lives, accruing more personal success, amassing more hope. But hope can do more than make you successful and lead to personal well-being. Hopeful individuals can share their wealth of hope, making the lives of others better. Imagine what could happen if we shared some of that hope surplus, making our personal hope a public resource. Could we create a culture and spirit dedicated to solving our biggest problems and making our communities better?

F
ollowers—students, employees, congregants, citizens—all need hope
. There it is. I just summed up the last century’s worth of scholarly works on leadership. It is worth repeating.
Followers need hope
. Whether you are following a teacher who is showing you how to solve a problem, a boss who is trying to win a company-saving contract, or a preacher who is working to strengthen your community,
you need hope.

Of course, there are some caveats to that statement. I will address one of them right here: followers have other needs that they look to leaders to meet.
Gallup discovered followers’ need for hope and other intangibles when it asked people to identify the most influential leaders in their lives.
Here, play along with the nation by answering the following question:

What leader has the most positive influence in your daily life? Take a few moments to think about this question if you need to. Once you have someone in mind, please list his or her initials. ______

Now, please list three words that best describe what this person contributes to your life.

______________________

______________________

______________________

A random sample of more than ten thousand people shared their thoughts during telephone interviews. Through the hard work and insight of a Gallup research team, each word describing a leader was compared and contrasted with other responses. Ultimately, the coding process rendered clear results about the needs of followers. Then the twenty-five most frequently mentioned words were studied carefully. Surprisingly, words we often associate with leadership, such as
wisdom
or
humility,
were nowhere near the top of the list.

Followers, whether referencing spiritual leaders, great leaders from the past, good bosses, or today’s community leaders, say they want the people they serve to meet four psychological needs: compassion, stability, trust, and hope. In return, followers give their commitment, creativity, mutual trust, and engagement.

A leader’s hope is especially valuable to followers during tough times. Gallup research, however, suggests that the vast majority of leaders do not spend enough time on making hope happen. Even leaders of large groups of people spend more time reacting to problems than initiating a better future.

Types of responses did not differ by type of leader. So, a manager is no less on the hook for providing trust than a spiritual leader. A CEO is no less responsible for giving love to followers than a parent. And political leaders are as responsible as other leaders for meeting the hope needs of their followers.

By studying hopeful leaders and talking to their followers, I found
that people who want to spread hope and motivate followers need to practice these three tactics:

Create and sustain excitement about the future.

Knock down existing obstacles to goals and don’t put up new ones.

Reestablish goals—regoal—when the circumstances demand it.

Leaders don’t necessarily have the budget or staffing that they need or want, but they do have infinite resources—hopeful thinking—in every one of their followers. Followers look to leaders to capitalize on the spirit and ideas of the times, to dream big, and to motivate them toward a meaningful future.

When people have a boss who makes them feel hopeful about the future, they are more committed to their jobs.
Specifically, when Gallup asked followers whether their leader at work (typically a manager) made them enthusiastic about the future, of those who said yes, 69 percent were engaged in their jobs, scoring high on a measure of involvement in and excitement about work. These engaged employees are the products of hopeful leadership. They are more innovative and productive than others, and they are more likely to be with the company for the long haul.

Of those followers who said their leader did not make them enthusiastic about the future, a mere 1 percent were committed and energized at work. These disengaged workers are a threat to business, coworkers, and themselves. They not only fail to make meaningful contributions; they undermine the hard work of others, and they are likely to be more physically and mentally unhealthy than their coworkers. And, for good
and bad, it is somewhat likely that they won’t be with the company one year later.