I have been digging through lots of boxes lately. Now, if a box has been sitting in the darkest corner of your garage, and you have not even SEEN the box for 15 years - chances are what’s inside that box may not be things you need, desperately, at this point in your life.
But when I dove into that box, I found the thing I needed most: Hope.
I worked for a great guy named Lewis Thayne about 30 years ago at a wonderful place called Agnes Scott College. From Lewis, I learned a whole lot of what I know about advancement, campaigns, building relationships and caring for people. He was a darned good strategist, writer, and creative thinker. He was a patient leader, teacher and mentor.
So this box was filled with all kinds of stuff from my time working with Lewis - feasibility studies, beautiful print materials, detailed campaign and event plans that became the blueprints for every major project I have encountered since.
He is the boss who rolled his eyes and told me I needed to hit the pause button now and then. Yep.
He also said “Hope is not a strategy.”
Now, I am pretty sure Lewis is not the first person to utter those words - but it was the first time I had ever heard them. And in the context of the moment, he was teaching an overzealous young professional faced with her first campaign that hoping to raise $50 million was not going to make it come marching through the door.
But decades later, digging through that box, and seeing those words again - I received that wisdom differently. Hope is not a strategy! It is something far bigger, brighter, deeper. It doesn’t have limits. It lives in your soul, not your head. It gives you the will to get up and keep moving when you are pretty sure you are used up.
Lewis doesn’t know it yet, but he taught me about hope all over again. I guess when the student is ready the teacher appears - even in a box in the corner, 30 years later.
So for this newsletter, we went looking for hope. And you know what? We found it all over the place. And we decided to use our Children’s Holiday Fund as the lens through which to tell some stories about neighbors across this Peninsula community that are in the business of keeping hope alive not only during the holidays, but throughout the year.
Hope is not a strategy - but it is absolutely fuel for the human spirit that leads good people to build strategies that shape actions that change lives. And hope lives everywhere - sometimes even in a dark corner, in a cardboard box.