Hopebeat Weekly: March 6, 2024

The Shine Hope Company proudly announces the City of Las Vegas joins the Hopeful Cities movement. The Hopeful Cities initiative is a comprehensive program and public health campaign aimed at raising awareness about the elements for creating, maintaining, and growing hope through targeted interventions across various city sectors, including government, the workplace, art, science, education, and healthcare.

Hopeful Cities is equipping cities around the world with the tools they need to create, maintain, and grow hope, citywide. Find out how you can join the movement, help spread and activate hope in your city. Email us at activate@theshinehopecompany.com or visit www.hopefulcities.org.

Yesterday I’m thrilled to share our study reviewing our Hopeful Mindsets on the College Campus Course was published in the Journal of American College Health. Hope is teachable!! It is so exciting to have additional evidence that we can teach hope around the world, especially with the recent news. If you know college administrators, college students passionate about mental health, or your own child is going away to college, have them consider taking Hopeful Mindsets on the College Campus or bringing it to their school for a full University activation.

Bringing me to the news. Fortune just did an article on hopelessness in America, and the mental health crisis in youth. Yet I would suggest it fundamentally is still a hopelessness crisis, as hopelessness is the primary symptom of anxiety and depression, the two biggest mental health disorders. It is also the single predictor of suicide and violence. Again, bringing me such excitement in showing that hope is teachable.

There is a cool new longitudinal study published on hope in youth. It showed that having hope for the future in adolescence was associated with improvements including higher cognition and self-rated health, less physical inactivity, fewer depressive symptoms, lower perceived stress, and improvement on a number of psychological and social factors including greater happiness, more satisfaction with parenting, and increased voting and volunteering in adulthood. Which again is so exciting, because Hope Is Teachable!!!

Which is why we haven’t written lately! We’ve been busy activating hope with other incredible partners. I just visited NAMI Nevada to teach hope skills to the community. I also attended the Disability Rights California, where I was able to spend time with Zoya Awan, our amazing partner from Walmart, Marisa Hamamoto, the incredible dancer from Infinite Flow, and Troy Kotsur, the first-ever deaf actor to win an Oscar! What an incredible celebration of amazing humans.

It was also a recent honor to keynote and connect with inspiring founders Gail and John Urso of Kevin’s Song. They are doing incredible work throughout Michigan, in honor of their son Kevin who lost his life to suicide when he was just forty-one. The conference was filled with so much connection and caring and I’m eternally grateful to have shared what I know about hope, and connect with others that care deeply for our teens including Dr. Hayley Watson of Open Parachute.

Another highlight was meeting Leslie Weirich of Leslie’s Hope. I was able to hear of Leslie’s incredible son Austin, all the love he spread to all he met, and Leslie’s work to turn her grief into inspired action with speaking to men and boys across the US. She so inspires me, as our boys need the kind of mother Leslie is now more than ever. She teaches them it is OK to feel sad, and express that sadness in healthy ways. What an Angel Leslie is to this world.

So grateful for these last few months full of connection. And to be activating communities on the ‘how’ to hope. If you want your college, workplace, city, or youth to get activated, feel free to reach out. All our books are now online and available for purchase (including the Teen Hope Guide and Hopeful Cities Playbook!).

Thank you so much for your continuous support on Hope! Together, we can make the world a place where hope thrives, and everyone knows ‘how’ to Shine Hope.

Keep Shining,

Kathryn

Kathryn Goetzke, MBA

• CEO & Chief Hope Officer, The Shine Hope Company
• Author of The Biggest Little Book About Hope
• Founder of International Foundation for Research and Education on Hope (iFred)
• Creator of Hopeful Cities, and Hopeful Minds
• Creator of Hopeful Mindsets Overview, Hopeful Mindsets in the Workplace Overview,  and Hopeful Mindsets on the College Campus Course
• Podcast host of The Hope Matrix
• Chief Mood Officer, The Mood Factory (taking a break, for hope!)
• www.kathryngoetzke.com