Hope Is Closer Than You Think

Community offers a much stronger source of optimism than national politics

By Emma Bloomberg

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Recently, a stranger in Virginia Beach stopped in traffic to help an elderly woman who had dropped something. On another day, in Sarasota, FL, a little boy handed his younger sister a strawberry. These are not moments that made headlines; they happened and then the day moved on. But that doesn’t mean we should underestimate their impact.

Last month, when my organization, Murmuration, surveyed nearly 5,000 Americans about what had given them hope recently, these were the kinds of moments people cited. In fact, nine in ten Americans could name a specific and recent moment that gave them hope.

A grandmother in New Mexico said it was watching how her granddaughter is being raised. A man in Indiana described a wonderful mentor coming into his life. A woman in Colorado wrote: “My daughter is cancer-FREE. If she can beat it, a lot of others can too.” And, of course, there was the stranger stopping traffic and the boy sharing his strawberry. The common thread running through these moments is that they are all about people showing up for other people. When Americans think about hope, they reach for human connection — and that tells us something beautiful about humanity.

What’s interesting is where people feel that hope: close to home. Two-thirds of Americans, 66%, feel hopeful about their own lives. Ask about their communities, and you’re at 54%; the country: 38%; the world: 36%. The farther out we look, it seems, the more the feeling fades.

When we asked respondents to describe a specific recent experience that gave them hope, 21% talked about witnessing kindness in their community. Seventeen percent mentioned some kind of personal progress. Sixteen percent pointed to a family milestone. Only 15% mentioned national events.

One way to understand this data and the story it tells is that hope springs from the perception of agency. People feel hope when they have a hand in shaping outcomes and when their own impact, or the impact of others, is something they can see and feel personally. When someone tells you they feel hopeful about their own life but less so about the world, they’re really telling you where they believe their actions can matter.

Our survey also asked people which actions best reflected hope. Thirty percent of respondents said helping someone who needs it, and 19% said caring for family and friends. Contrast that with the only 5% who said voting and the 7% who said creating or building something.

While that voting number is certainly striking, I don’t think we should interpret it to mean Americans have given up on democracy. I think it underscores that voting happens at a single point in time and involves a winner and a loser at the end — as compared with ongoing actions people can take to support each other. Voting is important, but few people experience voting alone as sufficient. The human connection of building and sustaining hope is something people understand needs to be practiced between elections, not just on the occasional Tuesday.

I’ve spent a long time working to advance and support civic life: in city government, poverty-fighting, education, and for the past eleven years leading an organization that supports community-focused groups across the country to organize, connect, and act more effectively by providing the research, data, technology, and support they need to build real and lasting civic power. From this vantage point, I’ve gained the perspective that systems and policies do matter, and that while hope is grounded in personal human connection, the conditions under which hope can flourish or be extinguished are often shaped by decisions made at all levels of government.

Hope is shaped by whether people have access to stable housing, economic opportunity, affordable health care, a sense of agency and belonging in their communities, and a representative government that is responsive to their needs. Those conditions don’t happen by accident — they are the product of choices made by local, state, and federal institutions. And so I acknowledge that while local civic engagement engenders hope and can create a ripple effect of positive action within communities, we also need those institutions to do the work to ensure people can truly thrive, and we need civic participation to hold those institutions accountable.

If we want to see civic engagement at the levels needed for true and lasting systems change, we have to take a lesson from community organizing: start local. Civic efficacy, which is the belief that your actions can produce real results, often begins with a small local action that produces a tangible local result. That’s why the person who shows up at the school board meeting is often also the one who organizes the block cleanup, or who checks on the elderly neighbor, or who knows which kids are struggling.

People see they can have impact, and that belief is the seed from which their desire to do more sprouts. And as others feel the impact of people’s efforts, they are more likely to believe in their own potential for impact. Civic life builds relationships, makes possible informal systems of mutual aid, and creates the potential for widespread change. If we start local, we unlock the potential for even greater impact in the future.

There’s another striking number from our data that suggests belief in the potential for impact starts with local efforts. Ninety-three percent of Americans believe that ordinary people can help change things in their communities. More than half of those people say they can make “a lot” or “a great deal” of difference. And, perhaps most important, more than four in ten actually took action to improve something where they live in the past year, whether that was volunteering, helping a neighbor with a project, teaching or mentoring someone, or simply imagining something better. They took their belief that change was possible and turned it into action and impact.

This widespread belief in what is possible — and willingness to act — is hugely promising for our future as a nation. It gives me a reason to hope. It reinforces the idea that hope is contagious: it spreads through human contact. Small moments of generosity, kindness, and action create a shared ripple that is hard to measure but easy to underestimate. These moments are the foundation of civic life. They are the foundation of community. And they are the foundation for change.

Hope is not denial or naivety; it’s a form of investment in our shared future even when that future isn’t clear. Hope has been the fuel for civic action that has propelled some of the greatest social justice movements in American history — from abolition and women’s rights to civil rights and anti-war activism.

In my own work, I’ve seen firsthand that the people who do civic work sustainably are the ones who see problems most clearly, know the risks most fully, and acknowledge that it’s likely everything they are fighting for won’t miraculously happen overnight. Their work extends far beyond elections to the ongoing work of advocating for their neighbors, strengthening local institutions — libraries, schools, faith groups, small businesses — and helping communities solve problems together. Even when systems that govern fall short and the outcome is uncertain, they continue to show up every day because they believe their communities are worth investing in.

So here is what I believe, and what we consistently see in communities across the country: hope is not a feeling you wait for, it is something you practice. Call the neighbor you have been meaning to check on, volunteer at the local food bank or monthly beach cleanup, show up at the school board meeting, or knock doors for a candidate you believe in. Pick up someone’s bag, or hand them a strawberry. When we act as if our actions matter, others begin to believe theirs do too. Each of us has a role to play in how change happens, how progress is made, and how trust in the world is rebuilt.

Emma Bloomberg is the founder and CEO of Murmuration, a nonprofit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services to help communities build and activate the power to transform America.