Episode 201: The Connection Between Hope & Philanthropy - Finding, Identifying, & Creating it-Personally & Organizationally
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett. I'm so honored that you take a few minutes of your time to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall.
I want to broaden our scope in this weekly conversation that I have. I look at this as my 21st-century classroom. I want to talk about hope, about what I see sometimes that holds from that. Why is hope important? And then the tactical pieces: why is it connected to philanthropy so critically? How do we develop it? How do we find it? How do we remember it?
I want to start with why I think I, at least here, perceive that there is maybe less hope than there used to be. So, on a very anecdotal scale, I've had a number of clients whose philanthropy numbers maybe aren't what they want. One is working through a campaign that, for various non-foundational related issues, is a little bit of a struggle. Another has an organization that wants them to fundraise for things that may not be feasible, but it's a hard conversation.
I've got some personal friends in the industry, professional colleagues who are trying to figure out where they're at and where they're going. I think there are also wider reasons for a reduction in hope. We have some world instability that is very prominent right now. We have the effects coming out of the pandemic, which, while medically, we probably aren't dealing with in terms of the direct nature of COVID, at least as much as we used to, the effects of it are still lingering.
We certainly have a changing economic climate where there has been inflation, and we candidly, while there may be some—and this is not a political commentary—there are some who say, “Hey, we're over it.” You look at the base necessities of a lot of people, and they're really struggling: groceries, gas, just basic clothes, and other things of that nature. That doesn't even take into account the issues involving housing.
When we talk about the wider lens of the world, I think we all recognize that we have a climate conversation that needs to occur. What does that look like? Where are we headed with that? Here, at least in the United States, we seem—and this is going to be my least favorite two months of every four years—although I love American elections. The advertising I could do without. The next two months are going to be hard because it's a lot of yelling and screaming.
We also have a lot of things in our personal lives. For me, I can tell you that last year, losing Dad was not the moment that we all wanted, and certainly, we are working through that. If I think more lightly—totally, and absolutely less important than anything I've already talked about—for me, I'm tired of Nebraska football losing. Now, by the time it gets played, maybe we've got a little run going, and we all feel better, but man, it's been a wearing 20 years when you invest your emotional soul into something and see it be disappointing.
You have your things in life as well that are troublesome, that are challenging, that are things you have to work through and figure out. What this all brings into context is what I call my 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, but most of the time, and maybe even 10, 80, 10. The things at the extremes, the people, the groups, the 10 percent—when you have an issue, they believe one thing, and the other 10 percent maybe believe—or 20 percent believe—the absolute opposite. They're the loudest.
Most of us live in the 60, 70, 80 percent in the middle. We're just trying to get along. Sometimes it's hard because we think that the loudest are the largest, and they're not; they're just loud. But we tend to find either hope or non-hope or despair more in that loudness at the ends of the paradigm.
So, my first moment of counsel, for whatever it's worth, is that most of us are in the middle. You can take comfort in that; most of us sit in the middle, and we're just trying to figure out how to work on the things that are most important to us, the day-to-day things that are priorities in our life.
Why is hope so important? Well, hope, in the professional sense, in the personal sense, in the more maybe national or global sense, is about psychology and emotional connection. When hope lives with you, with a family, with a small group, with an organization, with a community, with a nation—whatever it might be—several things come out of it.
Number one is motivation and drive. When you have hope, you're more likely to engage with the world in trying to get something done. Number two is there's a sense of resiliency and coping that comes when you have hope. You're more willing to maybe embrace what I term "water off a duck's back." While some things may not be able to be washed away, you're willing to fight through them because it's worth it; there's hope on the other side of that.
Number three is emotional well-being. We know from medical studies, particularly over the last 15 or 20 years, that when people are more grateful, more hopeful, they have incredible connections not only to mental and emotional well-being, but number four is also physical health well-being. Things like blood pressure and the thought process—when we talk emotional health, resiliency, being able to overcome—actually, there are studies now that indicate that when we have hope and gratitude in a positive way of looking at life, we fight off depression and negativity better on the health side.
Again, three and four—your emotional and physical well-being is better. Number five is hope brings social connection, which is something human beings strive for, need, and seek. When you have a group of people that all hope together, it becomes contagious and almost like collective action.
These five things are critical for us to understand because they connect us to this idea of what we're trying to accomplish, which we're going to get to in a moment: making the world a better place. There are times in our history that, if we look back, we can see both hope and non-hope or despair.
The first thing I want to talk about is that while things look a little bit upheaval in our world right now, there have been times in our history when it's been significantly worse. I mean, we're not even comparable to where we were in places like the late nineteen teens and the 1940s when we had world wars and just the thought process of tens of millions of people dying in a fight for a lot of different things. Most people would say something about freedom and democracy and letting people live the way they want.
Needless to say, it was about people dying for things they believed in. You could throw in the United States Civil War, where people were dying so fast they pale—in comparison to the number of deaths in the Civil War. We had a time in our country where we embraced slavery, which any rational person would say is an incredible stain on the historic nature of America. But it was ours. We can't run from it. We have to embrace it and say, “Yeah, and we did it. We're not going to let it happen again.”
I would say that the time involving the Great Depression, from an economic standpoint worldwide, the late last part of 1929 into the 1930s and all really up until the world through World War II in terms of economic strife at the local level—those were times when people, I mean, literally homelessness, 10 to 15 percent of the population had no home.
I mean, we certainly have challenges today where everything like that, where we had people who were literally having to sell their cars just to make sure their family could eat. The depression was just over 100 years ago, and I think most of us have not lived through those kinds of economic times. And we have other times like them in the 1870s. There was a depression in the 1930s. The 1930s depression was of epic proportion.
Politically, I would tell you that as a student of history, I like reading this stuff. While the presidential election and the congressional senatorial elections that are occurring right now, even maybe local elections are a little tough to take, to be honest with you, and no matter what side of the political aisle you're on, you can go back to 1824 and compare it to that in that presidential election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and you would find that what we're doing today is like nothing. Still not very fun, but in 1824, they were literally calling one of their presidential candidates' wives a whore in writing, which at times all they had, and have writing or television. It was abhorrent.
There have been worse times, but in those times, we've also found heroic leadership bringing us home. During the depression, it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt doing his fireside chats. You read the accounts of people's psychological connection to the president at the time, who is our longest-serving president. You may disagree with some of his economic policies, his political policy, whatever. He brought hope in those fireside chats to the radio, telling the American people, "We're going to get through this." Thus, in 1945, when he passes, it is an enormous emotional outlet of a loss of a leader that had guided them.
One of my all-time favorites in terms of leadership and hope is Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robin Island in South Africa for 27, 28 years. He comes out. Does he reach retribution? No, he preaches hope that we as a country can pull together to become a new identity of what the world might be. He didn't take his hatred for others, which I think many people might say he really was able to push away, but to create hope, not just for his people, the African people, black, but for all people in South Africa to bring it into the 21st century.
Winston Churchill, with his words—and I've done a couple of podcasts on Winston Churchill—is probably my all-time favorite leader because of his ability with words to move mountains in terms of hope. At a time when the world looked like it was turning on England in terms of what was going on in their potential invasion. They'd been thrown out of Europe. They have the Battle of Britain in 1940. He preaches hope.
There's also futuristic hope. What John F. Kennedy talked about in 1961, first at Congress in the State of the Union, and then at a speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas, talking about a goal of sending a man to the moon and bringing him back safely before the end of the decade was about hope. Hope brings communities opportunities to dream, to think about what might be, and this is why this is connected to what we do in philanthropy.
Philanthropy, let's start with the concept, does it mean money? It means love of mankind, love of humankind. And so, number one is, how is hope connected to what we do in philanthropy? Because it's our foundation. It's about hope bringing the thought that a difference can be made when we improve the lives of others and what I would call societal issues or problems. A lot of times hope is what gets a community to pull together to do something for others.
Number two is that hope inspires action. Much of the time, hope in and of itself, well, I think beneficial health-wise, doesn't actually move the needle. It's action that moves the needle. And this is action that is positive for both the donor, one of those rare times in life where there's two winners: the donor who feels like they're helping, making a difference, and the recipient who's needing to help. How is that not hopeful? That is the core of who we are.
The third way it's connected is that hope sustains us during challenging times. Think about in a very basic way, we had this happen here in Omaha this year, that a storm came through and a tornado. Most of the time when we see tornadoes out in the cornfields, this one hit the western suburbs and took our city down for a while. People losing homes, people losing everything—hope, both for people who needed the hope, who lost everything, but for people who saw the devastation and were willing to help, creating hope. The organization I think of that does the best is the Red Cross. They show up to foster, to engender hope.
The fifth is that hope can, when it becomes systematized, create change. Philanthropy and philanthropists are there to fund innovative solutions that might be too risky or not bring the kind of return a commercial investor—meaning, you know, for-profit business—wants. They don't want to do that if it doesn't bring the return or it's too risky or that governmental bodies are too slow. At the end of the podcast, I often said that philanthropy is the gap between governmental entities and commercial or free enterprise because free enterprise doesn't want to do certain things that it doesn't bring any money. The government moves too slow. That's where philanthropy sits at its best. Sometimes it has to partner with both to bridge that gap. That's really what we're talking about: systemic change.
Number five is that hope brings philanthropy a sense of empowerment in our communities, a sense that we're building capacity to accomplish more, that we foster this hope, this philanthropy to actually have more control of our future, not just individually, but collectively. This is what moves many people to come together in one vision.
And finally, within that vision, number six is the idea of solidarity that we can do better, we should do better, but also that this is a communal experience in a shared humanity. I talked about this many podcasts ago about the idea of a shared experience being a powerful ally. I drew it to the comparison of athletics, that when you go to an athletic event, the left and the right, the tall and the short, the poor and the rich, the white, the black, the Catholic, the Jewish, the Muslim—whatever differences in your community exist—sometimes, most of the time actually, are dismantled and pushed aside for the communal interest.
In my world, and in the sense of athletics, we're pulling together as one, whether it's the connection to really the definition, the idea of the foundation of philanthropy, or the idea of inspiring hope through action or creating the idea of challenging times and creating hope, or it becomes part of change in our community from a systematic perspective. It empowers us in terms of our communities or demonstrates solidarity and a kind of shared humanity. These are all the basics of philanthropy. It's what we do every day.
And so the last part of this is, well, what can you do to create hope, to recognize hope? You can look at this as an individual or you can look at this as a leader, doing it for others, doing it for yourself. And that's an "or" and an "and." It's not mutually exclusive. You should be thinking about both if you can.
So the first is recognizing hope. It's about looking at and finding positive future opportunities and outcomes. I always talk about with my son and his friends, and anybody else that will listen, that life isn't about what happens to you; it's about how you deal with it and how you deal with it. You have a choice. Do you look at everything negatively or do you try to find—and I hate the term, but it connects to what we're talking about—making lemonade out of lemons? Excuse me. Are you going to find options, opportunities, even when things aren't the perfect manner? How do we recognize a sense of grace that we all enjoy?
Even those who are maybe at the lowest end of our social economic status, having trouble with drugs, what can we do to foster a sense of hope? The first part is recognition, and that is in what's in the future to come, positive or negative. The second is creating goals, being goal-directed. If you set goals, which we've done a number of podcasts on, what that's doing is creating hope for yourself because you're thinking about how to improve. That's positive.
Number three is recognizing moments where you have dealt with and shown resiliency during adversity. My son had a soccer game here recently, and they've been very successful. We have not really even been challenged in terms of a game in a year, year and a half, and they weren't ready to play against a team that was much better. They got down quick, and you could tell they were shocked. I kept saying, "Hey, look, let's play against ourselves. Keep doing what we're doing." What came out of it was a tie; we came back and scored about a minute and a half left, tying the game 4-4.
Now, I sent an email to the parents later that day and said, "I've never been more proud of this group of kids in a tie versus any win because they dealt with adversity." They created, in many ways, small goals: get better every time I'm out there, do small things to get better, be a team, choose to pull together. That made me think about your office when there are challenges in philanthropy. Do you pull together to get through the adversity? Do you individually, when there are challenges, think about how to observe yourself and others and what you've gone through to realize you've accomplished things before? Resiliency is critical to overcoming lack of hope and finding it again.
The last in recognizing hope is the idea of emotional flexibility. Can you pay attention to the emotions that just don't drown you out that are negative? I'm really talking about this fear to see a better chance for the future. So recognizing hope is about that future orientation but being goal-directed about resiliency and about creating a vision of being more positive than negative.
You can also create hope for yourself and for the people that you serve in your mission as a nonprofit leader, board member, employee, or whomever you are. Hope is also about whether you, as an organization, are thinking big enough. Creating hope is possible if you do it in certain steps. The first is setting up achievable goals. For an individual, that's maybe very small, but for an organization, that could be large. What is achievable is dependent on the amount of hope, vision, and strategy you and your organization have.
Number two is fostering a positive environment. It's interesting; I've got a client who has brought in some new employees, and there's one who's just negative. That's always a problem; there's always issues. What we've begun to talk about is whether the organization, even though she has skill sets and can deliver certain things, is better off without that negativity because fostering a positive environment will create more hope for everybody else in the office.
Number three is engaging in inspirational activities. Yes, we have to do the mundane and the day-to-day, but what other things can we do that are inspirational to see others possibly overcoming their challenges, recognizing those in the office who have gotten through their particular goals, and celebrating your own goals? All of those things are inspirational and bring value to the overall office and effort that you might be going through.
You've heard me talk about this; I can't spend a lot of time on it. In fact, I have done a number of podcasts on the idea of embracing and practicing mindfulness or gratitude. What are we actively grateful for every day?
Number five: how do we celebrate those that help support where we're trying to go and create a sense of an environment of encouragement for accomplishment?
The last one is if maybe all the first five or maybe a little bit above your own for a challenge. Think back on the things in life where you've seen success. Can you reflect upon that? Recognize some things you've gone through and realize that success probably did not come without a little bit of pain or challenge that you overcame? Let the past things you've dealt with prepare you for the things you're dealing with today.
So from a practical perspective of creating hope, you can embrace the idea of setting goals, fostering a positive environment, finding people who want to do good things, engaging in inspirational activities, practicing mindfulness and gratitude, and being in an environment that's supportive and encouraging. Finally, reflect on the past things that were successful.
This is a little less tactical than what we usually talk about on this podcast, but I see a lot less hope than we should have. I know things may be a little uneven at times. It has been worse, but I believe in the future of where we're headed. I believe in the intelligence, dedication, and positive nature of humanity. It doesn't mean it's utopia or from it, but there's more hope out there.
What I want you to do is find ways of recognizing it, embracing it, and creating it for yourself, for the people you work with, and for your family. This way, you have a sense of the value that you deliver every day in philanthropy and hope that the next day is better than the one we just experienced.
Don't forget to check out the blogs at howlettphilanthropy.com—two-week, 90-second reads. If you'd like to, please feel free to reach out to me at podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. This whole episode has been about challenges and finding solutions to create a better environment and hope. That's the definition of philanthropy. As we mentioned earlier in this podcast, it is not about, and never has been when we look at it the right way, about money. It's about how we make the world a better place—love of mankind, love of humankind.
Some people make things happen; some people watch things happen; and then there are those who wonder what happened. You are someone who's creating hope for someone else if you're in the nonprofit space. You may not see it directly, but you are. You find others who want to do the same—people who want to make things happen for those in our community, organizations, and community parts that are wondering what happened. That is the essence of hope.
I look forward to seeing you next time right back here on the next edition of "Around with Randall." And don't forget, make it a great day.