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Order Rich Harwood's Latest Essay: Make Hope Real
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)
A foreward
by Sterling K. Speirn
President &
CEO, W.K. Kellogg
Foundation
Rich Harwood has been asking a very important set of questions for some time now. And ever since his book, Hope Unraveled: The People’s Retreat and Our Way Back, appeared, more and more people are asking these same questions. Questions about people’s understandings and their sense of shared values, their connection to others in community, their concern for the American Dream.
In this essay, he invites us to consider two more questions: How do we make hope real and how do we accelerate change for the public good? With the notion of “making hope real” Harwood takes a fresh look at how people’s fundamental yearning for engagement and common purpose can often be sidetracked by what he calls “false hope.” With this discussion, Harwood joins a tradition that Robert Bellah and his co-authors revitalized in their book, Habits of the Heart almost twenty years ago. Now, just as then, the notion of covenants among people, the fabric of relationships, and common understandings of how we can engage in public discourse and public actions are seen as the fundamental building blocks for making hope real.
What is so helpful about Rich Harwood’s approach, is that he knows how to link the practical with the possible. Where he sees the emergence of many “pockets of change” he asks how these can be connected to each other and to a broader sense of democratic engagement. The advice here is aimed squarely at what Harwood sees as a set of sensibilities that must be pursued if we are to help create a renewed ethic and experience of public purpose.
The aspirations of ordinary people, the emergence of citizen-based values, and the rise of a new breed of leaders are three of the trends described here. But to link and nurture these positive forces, Harwood argues what is needed now are more pathways for people to engage in public life, and what he calls “Boundary Spanning Organizations” to help bring different people together. This is the place where authentic hope can emerge when people have the opportunity to put tough issues on the table and acknowledge the reality of the challenges they face.
It is my hope that this is the kind of work that more Foundations will embrace as one of the most powerful levers in our quest to “help people help themselves.” In the United States, organized philanthropy has every reason to care about revitalizing our democratic practices and to help support civic entrepreneurs like Rich Harwood and the hundreds of local leaders he portrays. Linking the aspirations of ordinary people to robust practices that engage them in public problem solving is just what we need at this time to “make hope real.”
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