“Hope Is Not A Strategy.” (But It Is What Keeps Us Alive.)
Thoughts from a Greenlights Staffer on the Way to Africa

Note: This article was written by Janie for the monthly e-newsletter of Greenlights for NonProfit Success, her recent former employer.

In Malawi, a small country in Africa, prisoners die daily in overcrowded, understaffed prisons. Homeless children roam the street begging for food or a bit of money to survive the day. Across the country, mothers sit next to husbands who are dying of AIDS, not knowing what will happen to them and their children when their only source of income disappears.

Aid organizations have flooded the country, but the best they can do is try to stem the flood of death. “That’s what we do,” says Sylvester Kalonge, the Malawi coordinator for food security and emergencies for CARE International, quoted in the New York Times on December 7.

“We keep people alive.”

In Central Texas this week, a prisoner killed himself in a crowded jail, his parents alleging lack of health care for a chronic mental health disorder. The city government scratches their collective head this Thursday over the hundreds of homeless people begging for money or a bite to eat on Austin streets. Despite a drug revolution in our country, AIDS organizations still man hospice care houses to give dignity to dying patients. Victims from this year’s natural disasters are already threatening to disappear into the cracks of society, desperate and unsure how to rebuild their lives.

Hundreds of nonprofits in Central Texas struggle to face these problems every day, doing it to keep people alive.

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In January, I’ll leave my Greenlights post as Director of Education & Communication, a job that I have loved for so many reasons for the last three years. This March, my husband and I will take up residence in Malawi, a country of about 11 million people in southeastern Africa. I’ll be working there for an African nonprofit called the Story Workshop that uses a mix of advocacy and social mobilization on behalf of human rights, democracy, food security, gender equity, AIDS education, conservation of natural resources, literacy and economic development.

Some people have told me they think I’m courageous to go. Some people have gone so far as to say generous.

But the truth is that I am going not so much to help as to be helped, not to teach what I know but to learn from others.

The truth is that I am not sure quite why I need to go.

I know that I want to understand why we do the things we do as people. How we are all bad and good at the same time. Why we know what to do to make things right in the world and yet, around the earth, continue to make the same mistakes, face the same problems. I know that I need to understand better what drives us as humans – what causes us to work, to learn, to love and to hate, to hurt and help each other. In a selfish way, I also need to know what I can do to be useful.

But I am realizing that there is something else, something more powerful I have learned here from Greenlights and many of you, that drives me to go.

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At our holiday party this week, one of our board members mentioned a project she is working on with an area nonprofit – one that has been through several false starts and is just now gaining traction. Wondering over all she has learned over the last few years, she said, “As I look back today, the thing I wish I had known then is this: ‘Hope is not a strategy.’”

She was referring, of course, to a popular business book of the same name, a book that champions strategic thinking for salespeople, showing them how to turn intent into results.

I nodded. I agreed with her sentiment and generally with the principle of the book. After all, it corresponds to our key tenets at Greenlights. We give people strategies and skills, direction and resources so that they don’t have to rely on hope alone to fulfill their missions. We try to help organizations channel their passions to make the most powerful difference they can. We talk about plans, about communication, about roles and responsibilities, about outcome and evaluation. We talk mostly about things that can be measured.

But perhaps, I am thinking now, what we don’t talk about enough is hope.

Hope isn’t measurable. It isn’t quantifiable or results-based. On most days, it isn’t even enough for those of us striving to make practical, real change in the world. Hope seems a slippery idea in our world of concrete and facts; we’re suspicious of those who hold it up like a flag as a justification or explanation for anything at all.

But, while hope may not be a strategy, it occurs to me, most of us are driven by it. We must be. Otherwise, why do we go on? Why wake up every day to look head-on at the injustice and the inequality, the abuses that we see in our world, whether Austin or Africa?

This year at our Crossroads Conference, the closing keynote speaker Dan Hayes, (yes, a close relation) mentioned a book called “The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness.” And I wondered how the book’s author, Jerome Groopman, defined true hope for his sick patients who are staring into the chasm of death:

“Hope…” he asserts, “does not cast a veil over perception and thought. In this way, it is different from blind optimism: It brings reality into sharp focus.”

So it must be, I think, this unveiled hope that drives us. It must be the backbone, the motivation, for the work we do. And as I think about my job here at Greenlights for the past three years and my interactions with my colleagues, clients, and so many of you, I realize that what I continue to be inspired by is their – and your – sense of hope in our world.

And I guess this is why I am going to Africa. I guess it is what makes the CARE representatives in Malawi get out of bed every morning. And my suspicion is that it is what carries each of us working with nonprofits in Central Texas throughout each day.

So thanks to you for all the forms your hope has taken in my life – the courage to feel passionately, to think critically, to work, to play, to laugh and to cry.

And if there is one thing that I hope as I leave, I guess, it is that we all collectively manage to do a little more than keep people alive – that we strive to pass along a little bit of hope.

Bon Voyage and my best to all of you who have taught and given me so much!

We’re all different people than we were the last time I sent an installment. That I know for sure. It’s strange to realize that we are so geographically far away from each other at such a significant time, but we’re all struggling in our own ways with similar questions and emotions. In that, our world has become claustrophobically small. I’m sure that for all of us the attacks have been a devastating reminder of both the ephemeral nature of life and the importance of valuing those that we love.

So first of all, Jimmy and I love you. This usually goes at the end, but it belongs at the beginning – every time. Thanks to all of you for your prayers and thoughts and phone calls and emails. It’s hard not to be home, but I know things are hard there as well. Probably harder. Please know that you are in our minds, laughter, tears, worries and hearts every day.

With all of the rhetoric, opinions, grief and anger spinning everywhere, I tried to write something about anything, anything other than the terrorist attacks. I couldn’t. There is nothing else on my mind. For those of you who are fed up with opinions, skip this installment. Hopefully the next one will be more palatable. But in defense of the editorializing to come, I think it’s important that we each add our voices to the debate.

In the last week of August, I sat in a computer security briefing at the embassy about a new network to be implemented on our office computers. A team of nine federal employees had come to Cyprus, and as part of the training we watched a Power Point presentation on “malicious code,” “data migration,” and passwords. On one of the slides, just for emphasis, a picture of Osama bin Laden peered from one corner and an animated stick of dynamite sparked in the other. After the meeting, the facilitator gave out calendars to people who had answered questions. (For some reason I got one, though the only thing I said was how paranoid it was that our CD-ROM drives were being dismantled out of fear of viruses.)

A couple of days later I found myself in a conversation with one of the Marines posted here. He was telling me about his weight-training regimen and then launched into a pronouncement about how the Marines were the best-trained fighting force in the world. His comments seemed so over the top, and he was so worked up with pride and aggression that I stopped him in the middle of a sentence. “Okay,” I said, “but who are we fighting?”

Those who have been licking their chops for war no doubt see an opportunity to sink combat teeth, and all that defense cash, into. But what and where is the enemy? This seems to be the paradox. George Bush claims we are at war, but war presumes an identifiable enemy. Terrorism of course, goes the rallying cry, but terrorism is a way of life, not a quantifiable physical force. When I read the news I can’t help but see Don Quixote charging at windmills.

This year, the US government handed over more than 50% of all Congressional discretionary money to the Pentagon. That’s $349 billion, compared to the second highest national priority, education, which got a measly $45b. This was supposed to make us all feel safe, but now the enormity of the uselessness of our resources has rendered us helpless beyond belief. Maybe it’s time that we, as a nation, stop to realize the enormous effect our actions have on the world, wake up to the dark place to which our anger is taking us, and admit that, perhaps, our country’s power is its greatest weakness.

If that is so, I hope and pray that we can channel that power into the equality and democracy we all learn as children that our country stands for. I want us to be permitted, each and every one of us, to share our thoughts and contribute to the enormous decisions that are being contemplated at the out-of-reaches of our government today. I hear all the heart-warming stories about Americans uniting in the face of the grief and loss, public opinion coalescing, people coming together as one under the American flag. But I also read reports of shootings and beatings of Arab-Americans, gun and ammunition sales skyrocketing, potential bombings of innocent civilians in far-flung places.

I want to be sure that our well-placed grief and sense of community will not be used against us. I want to know that our support for each other will not be manipulated to justify mindless revenge. I want our differences to be respected, even as we share one another’s pain. I want no part in the culpability for committing atrocities as reprehensible as the crimes that were committed in New York and Washington DC. But no matter what our country does, every one of us will stand as the accused.

After George Bush’s speech on Thursday night, Trent Lott came to the podium and said, “Tonight, there is no opposition party.” While an appeal to solidarity in a time of national tragedy is reasonable, there is a frightening side to this statement as political rhetoric. For while our government was overtly garnering its resources for war and George Bush was declaring a “crusade,” that very day thousands had marched in an antiwar protest in Oregon. Last week more than 150 antiwar demonstrations and peace vigils, drawing thousands, had been organized in New York, New Jersey, Missouri, Maine, Oregon and California. Punk musicians, pacifists, and national church councils have come together to urge integrity and restraint. My hope is that these efforts are not obscured and that the solidarity continues to build – not merely againstterror but for peace.

Despite Cypriots’ dubious feelings about American foreign policy in the area over the past forty years, and notwithstanding a vocal minority that don’t mind spewing the “you got what you deserve” rhetoric towards specific Americans, the support from the people around us here has been incredible. The day after the attacks, I got calls and emails from people I had met in passing, once or twice in meetings, or through friends of friends. The scores of flower bouquets placed on the embassy gates by Cypriots bring tears to my eyes almost every time I see them. (Courtesy of Cathy Rissler, you can see a photo of this – though it doesn’t do justice to the scale – at http://home.earthlink.net/`hankinhsd/thankyou.htm, page 4. Last Friday, the sirens went off at noon, here as well as all across Europe. Cars stopped, interviews halted, and everyone took three minutes of silence to grieve for the lives that were lost and to say thanks for the ones saved.

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Other Notes of Significance

Robin came to visit last week. While a strange and sad time, it was so wonderful to have home come to Cyprus. Having her here felt like having an anchor to hold onto. We went to the beach, saw a belly dancer and went to a barbecue. We also, you guessed it, did a triathlon. Like the other visiting members of Team In(adequate) Training before her, Robin was a standout, completing the longest distance possible and even winning a medal.

The Wales Half-Ironman Triathlon on September 9 was quite an experience for these two innocents from the temperate climates of Cyprus and Texas USA. Two days before the race, we tested the lake water for the swim amidst falling rain and temperatures. Jimmy had a panic attack from the cold, and I felt numb to my skull. The water temperature, it turned out, was a balmy 55 degrees. As it turned out, it rained all week. When race day arrived, nothing had changed. The wind was whipping at gusts of up to about 40 mph, and the sky was black with rain clouds.

Nevertheless, the swim went off better than could be expected and, numb toes notwithstanding, the bike ride began without a hitch. Within the first five miles, the wind blew my right contact out of my eye, and I was down on the ground in the way of bikers futilely feeling the pavement. Resolutely, I decided that this is why nature gives us two eyes, and continued on. Unfortunately, nature also gives us replays (What did Marx say – the first time as tragedy, the second as farce?), and at mile 48 of the 56-mile ride, my left contact was also lost to the wind. Down I was on the pavement once again, this time with my face closer to the ground.

By this time, I had lost my capacity for patience. The bike course had been a grueling battle with winds and steep two- and three-mile hills already. I was tired of distracting myself with grandiose visions of myself winning the Tour de France, and at this point, even the saving grace of spectacular views had been deprived me. Being out in the midst of the Welsh countryside with little to guide me, I continued on carefully and squintingly. At this point, I hadn’t yet seen Jimmy, who had started in the second swim wave fifteen minutes behind me and hadn’t yet passed me on the bike. At mile 50, he blew by me, and when I slowed him down to ask his opinion on my plight, he pulled his glasses off his face and handed them to me. What heroism! What bravado! What a guy.

In this way, with much-too-large glasses bouncing on the end of my nose, I completed the run portion of the race and crossed the finish line. Jimmy had finished with flying colors 26 minutes before me at 5 hours and 23 minutes. I pulled in, limping and cold but proud, at 5:49.

Once again, we love you all. Remember how firmly you are here with us in our psyches and hearts – not only now, but all the time. Please let us know if there is anything we can do for you. Please keep us in your thoughts and send us an email when you get a chance.  If you want to call, here’s an incentive: We’ll call you back. The rate is dirt cheap from here, so if you pay for a minute, we’ll foot the bill for the conversation.

Much love,
Janie and Jimmy