HOPE Alliance Newsletter

Edition # 6

Ripples of H.O.P.E.

Hope Alliance

Health - Opportunity - Privilege - Education

At the center of every circle we live within are four domains: health, opportunity, privilege, and education. Living in good health, leveraging timely opportunities, accessing our privileges, and learning as much as we can are efforts we make that represent our hope. Does a sense of fear and doubt ever creep into this process? For me, every single day. Hope without fear doesn't exist; that's called?naivety, but fear also incites action.

Hope without action is wishful thinking.

Embracing failure as a necessary element of hope is a critical element of success. If failure was absolute, nobody would ever learn how to ride a bicycle. Strangely, fearing failure is the same as fearing success. If we don't keep trying when we come up against a roadblock, in a way we're saying "What if I get over that challenge... then what?"

Hope is the alpha. All resiliency, all fear, and all action are derived from hope, "the thing with feathers... that sings the tune without the words" as so?beautifully?described by Emily Dickinson in her poem entitled "Hope"...

Health

HEALTH is a broad word encompassing many areas of wellness. Physical health, mental health, social health, emotional health; being healthy can mean many different things, and although each of the ways we can be "healthy" is different and involves other elements, they are also synergistic.?

Much research has supported the fact that physically healthy people tend to struggle less with mental health issues. The mind and the body are inextricably connected. Our thoughts and our emotions are expressed through our physical bodies, making them symbiotic.

The 'H' in HOPE represents each individual's state of health in different contexts. These can be measured individually in an isolated way, or they can be measured as elements that are connected and somewhat interdependent. Nonetheless, if we as individual human beings aren't healthy, all bets are off.?

It doesn't matter what opportunities we've been given, what privileges we've been granted, or what we've been taught if we are not healthy enough to create purpose around these things.?

One only has to look to Hollywood to prove that all the beauty, wealth, popularity, and adoration in the world cannot mitigate a sense of hopelessness and purposelessness in people who do not feel a sense of wellness and general health.

Opportunity

OPPORTUNITY is a word used to describe circumstances that make it possible to do something. 'Circumstances' are sometimes understood as things beyond our control; they just are, but they can also be changed and manipulated.

Opportunities derive from the way we change and manipulate circumstances. They are hopeful, and they are possible.

We can certainly manufacture our opportunities, but often we are granted opportunities by others, like gifts to lift us and support us making it possible for us to do something. Everyone needs opportunities in life, and the more we have, the higher our chances of relative success. Opportunities should never be wasted.

At the same time, we sometimes fail to capitalize on opportunities despite our best efforts to try. This is alright because that effort then becomes the manifestation of an opportunity to learn from the failure or misstep. These opportunities to learn from mistakes are the most valuable opportunities that exist. If failure were anything but an opportunity to evolve, then nobody would ever learn how to ride a bicycle.

The "O" in hope connotes opportunities; those that we create for ourselves by having the will to change and manipulate circumstances, and those that we derive from the efforts of others to change and manipulate circumstances on our behalf.?

Everyone needs opportunities in life to be successful.

Privilege

The "P" in the word hope represents PRIVILEGE; a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

Unlike opportunities that can be relatively easy to manufacture, privileges are somewhat harder to come by. In many cases we need to be born with them; white privilege, financial privilege, male privilege... we can't manipulate or engineer the realities of our existence.

Even though we may not enjoy the luxury of birthright privileges, we can be granted privileges to offset them... learning privilege, the privilege of education, social privilege, the privilege of social connection, emotional privilege, and the privilege of knowing we're supported by significant others are some examples.

Like opportunities, we all need privileges. Also, like opportunities, privileges can be established where there's a will to do so. Typically, privileges are derived through the efforts of significant others to provide them for us. This is not to say we can't divine and create contexts to provide privileges for ourselves, just that the latter is a lot harder to do than the former.

Everyone benefits from privileges in their lives.

Education

The "E" in the word hope is representative of the word EDUCATION. Learning is a vital element in life. If we can't learn, we can't be viable and independent. We can't take care of ourselves.

Robert Sylwester, an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon until 2016 describes that we (human beings) are in constant motion; travelling in simultaneous physical, psychological, emotional and cognitive realms.?

I once heard Robert Sylwester tell the story of the sea squirt, the only animal that once it has secured its basic needs for safety and food, stays put from that point on, and then digests what it doesn't need anymore; its brain. The sea squirt becomes safely stationary. No brain, no movement. Sylwester characterizes the need for higher-order thinking organisms to be in motion,

The planning, regulation, and prediction of movements are the principal reasons for a brain. Plants are as biologically successful as animals, but they don’t have a brain.?An organism that’s not going anywhere of its own volition doesn’t need a brain. It doesn’t even need to know where it is. What’s the point? Being an immobile plant does have its advantages, however. Plants don’t have to get up every day and go to work because they’re already there.?On the other hand, if an organism has legs, wings, or fins, it needs a sensory system that will inform it about here and there, a make-up-its-mind system to determine whether here is better than there or there is better than here, and a motor system to get it to there if that’s the better choice – as it is, alas, when we have to go to work.

I think that learning can be described as movement; multiple journeys over a lifetime in the simultaneous physical, psychological, emotional and cognitive realms. I believe the process of inquiry provides us with opportunities to travel the most engaging pathways on these journeys, perhaps fortunately, the ones less travelled.?

Learning is motion toward the things we want to accomplish.

Four Domains Centering Four Directions

Rippling from the center of every circle we live within are four directions. Our journeys through life always begin in the east and progress clockwise eventually reaching the north.

Respect - Understanding - Relationships - Responsibility

Respect

Respect is in the east. It's the direction toward which we all need to gaze with wonderment at the world surrounding us and begin to simply realize we are part of this world; we are learning to be. We begin to feel an implicit purpose to learn. We need answers to the question, “Why?” We walk the path of discovery and need support for the answers we seek. We must establish value in learning to help define purpose. A template for interaction between ourselves and the environments surrounding us is established on the path of respect. Interacting with ideas and concepts in the domain of respect leads to the establishment of self-identity, and orients us toward the evolution from dependence to independence.

Understanding

Understanding is toward the south. The domain of understanding is where we learn to know. Skill acquisition, new knowledge and rationale for life-long learning are established within this domain. We begin developing an independent nature as we take risks with learning and form the intrinsic motivation to discover. In the domain of understanding, we sharpen our focus on the surrounding world, looking more critically at ourselves and others in our quest to gain knowledge and make sense of things.

Relationships

Relationships bring us toward the West where we begin to understand the value of interdependency among people; we learn to live with each other in mutually beneficial ways. People who function competently at this stage seek extrinsic sources of support in their developing relationships, and they begin to understand that interdependency is about distributing strengths among a network of collaborative people working together to learn. In the domain of relationships, we become more resilient by seeking the support of significant others. We learn how to think deeper and critically about ideas and establish self-imposed boundaries.

Responsibility

Those who have travelled full circle enter the domain of responsibility where they learn to do. They display an implicit understanding of the imperative to serve themselves first so they can responsibly serve others. They understand what taking action means. They become caregivers for those travelling the hope paths behind them. In the domain of responsibility, we display intrinsic knowledge and insight as a result of our experience, and we begin to feel confident enough as leaders to engage others; to support and nurture them.

Explore Your HOPE Perspective

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HOPE Alliance Passion Projects

Hope Without Action is Wishful Thinking

Edu KARE

Edu KARE and its complementary blog KARE Givers https://www.karegivers.ca/ is a long-standing project to support positive child development. Centred in social, developmental and learning theory, Edu KARE stands for "educating kids from at-risk environments. It's important to understand that the singular prerequisite for the risk context is the perception of the child as an individual... if one believes they are at risk, they are. The reality must be free of judgment and solution-focused support is essential. KARE Givers stands for Kids From At-Risk Environments, and the effort made to support them.

In order to develop people who will be smarter, healthier and more creative than we are, teachers carry a vast responsibility to perform their craft at the highest levels of competence. The KARE Givers blog is about teaching and learning in a complex and evolving world. One has only to search "education quotes" to learn that in history, virtually anyone who ever had anything impacting and intelligent to say, also had something to say about education and how the system and people within it shape and form society through their work, whether it be good, bad or indifferent. The blog is dedicated to those who value, question and want to contribute to the improvement of the education system; those that believe every child is worth our best effort. The leaders of tomorrow are the children in our care today; our gifts to the future. We are creating the future right now.

Support for Boys and Men

Grow Boys is an effort to engage boys and men in their own happy, healthy growth and development.

The idea to initiate an effort to support the happy, healthy growth and development of boys was?conceived?thirteen years ago. All along Grow Boys has been framed as the creation of a broad support network including an annual conference for fifth-grade boys. With?emphasis?on the word network, it has always been about identifying the particular developmental needs of young men and then accessing local resources to provide support services within our community. Our network has grown significantly since then, and we continue to regularly connect with new supporters. What we know through our experiences working with boys as teachers, health care providers, counsellors, coaches, mentors etc. is that boys need our support in a world that's throwing a lot at them lately.

We have framed our effort in the context of the Hope Wheel. We believe hope is an action word... we can wish for anything we want, but to truly make good things happen, we have to take some form of action. We need to teach our boys this important perspective. The four directions around the Hope Wheel symbolize the journey we all go through as we learn and grow. This journey becomes our story; our cultural tail... the element that defines us?as individuals and parts of groups.?

Through local research to support our mission and vision, and the evolution of sustainable support networks for boys of all ages, we aim to create a model that can be easily replicated in any community. We know that context is key, and that Grow Boys won't look the same in every case, but we will support any local effort to collaborate and learn from our experiences if folks want to create a Grow Boys initiative in a different community.

If you are interested in initiating a local effort in your community to support the?healthy, happy?growth?and development of your boys, please get in touch. We'd be glad to help.