Have Hope

Hope And Trust

By Yuet Mee Ho-Nambiar

In April, I was in Greece for the annual conference of ebbf — ethical people building the future. Since 1990, ebbf has been gathering people from more than 50 countries who believe that business can — and should — be a force for social good. From the very first session, something in the room felt alive: the particular joy of being among people who are actively working to build communities and who believe that what they do matters.

Hope is not a new topic for me. Two micro not-for-profits I run carry it in their names — Have Hope, which among other activities, offers eyeglasses to those who cannot afford clear sight, and Be Hope, which walks alongside children learning to read and write who might otherwise be left behind. So, when the conference theme was announced as ‘Reorienting Towards Hope’, I was being given language for something I had long been living — and needed to understand more deeply.

The keynote speakers pointed us toward Snyder’s Hope Theory which defines hope not as an emotion but as a practical structure. Hope, in his framing, is something we build and tend — and, if we are not paying attention, something we can lose. It is a capacity, not a feeling. It doesn’t arrive because things are going well and vanish when they aren’t. When it deteriorates, people drift, lose their footing, and over time become cynical — not because they stopped caring, but because they stopped believing that caring makes a difference.

One speaker built on Synder’s three pillars — Goals, Pathways, and Agency. Another speaker introduced a complementary framework: the Triad of Hope comprising three nodes of Vision, Agency, and Assistance.

Together, they suggest something richer than either alone. Synthesising the two, I find four necessary nodes for sustaining hope: Vision, Pathways, Agency, and Assistance. Each is necessary. None is sufficient on its own.

Vision is the sense of where we are going and why it matters — values as North Star, a destination concrete enough to move toward, and a relationship with process that understands hard stretches as part of the journey, not detours from it. Without vision, we are moving but don’t quite know why.

Pathways is the belief that a route exists. Not certainty that it will be easy, or that we know every step — but the conviction that a way through is possible. Without it, vision becomes a beautiful destination we cannot reach, and agency becomes effort without direction. Pathways convert aspiration into motion.

Agency is the hinge on which hope turns — the lived experience of knowing that what we do matters, that our choices carry weight, that our decisions produce real effects. It is what turns intention into action. Without it, even the clearest vision and the most well-mapped pathway lead nowhere.

Assistance is the acknowledgement that none of us does this alone. Some support is structural — the conditions quietly working in our favour. Some is human — the people who walk with us, who hold things when we cannot, who remind us we are not standing by ourselves. Reaching for that is not weakness. It is wisdom.

Take away any one and hope becomes fragile. Vision without pathways: purpose without a way to move. Pathways without agency: a route we feel powerless to take. Agency without assistance: motion that burns out. Assistance without vision: warmth without direction. All four together, and hope becomes something we can actually build and sustain — in ourselves, in our teams, in our organisations.

I like to offer a fifth element — and it sits not at the edge of this architecture but at its centre. That element is Trust. It is what holds the four nodes together and makes each of them functional. It could be said that trust runs beneath Synder’s theory like a current, present but unnamed, not surfaced.

Hope as Potential Energy

Serendipitously, I stumbled upon something Maria Popova had written in The Marginalian that gave me the metaphor I didn’t know I was looking for. She describes hope as the potential energy of reality — not something we make up or summon, but something already woven into the structure of things, waiting to be released. Like a stone held above the ground, carrying energy not yet in motion. When I read that, the penny dropped. Vision, pathways, agency, and assistance are not ingredients we add to create hope. They are the conditions that release hope already present in the situation. The possibility was always there.

But potential energy needs a trigger to move. Here, that trigger is trust — trust in the possible. Without trust, vision is just words on a page. Without trust, we cannot believe the pathways are real. Without trust, agency collapses — why act if we don’t believe our actions lead anywhere? And without trust, assistance becomes hollow — we cannot really receive support from people we do not believe in, or from a universe we experience as indifferent. Trust is not one element among four. It is the animating force that runs through all of them.

Snyder maps the structure, Popova explains what powers it.

A Deeper Trust

But this raises a question — where does trust itself come from?

There is the kind of trust we build slowly through experience — kept promises, honest conversations, showing up when it would have been easier not to. That kind of trust is earned.

And then there is another kind entirely. The conviction that things tend toward good — and that people, most of them, most of the time, carry within them a genuine desire to do right. The evidence is always mixed as people disappoint, and systems fail. But if we wait for certainty before extending this trust, we will wait forever. This deeper trust is not reasoned into. It is decided — a choice to read the ambiguous evidence of human nature in a particular direction. When held consistently, that choice shapes not just how we see the world, but what the world offers back to us.

This stems from the belief that the human being is essentially noble — that the capacity for generosity, fairness, and love is not the exception but the latent condition in each of us. This is not sentimentality. I acknowledge that fear, ego, and habit can pull us elsewhere. But the deeper current runs toward good. And when we treat people as if that is true — before they have fully proven it — we create the conditions in which it is more likely to become true. We see it in the smallest acts: a stranger’s unexpected kindness, a gesture offered with no thought of return. Not anomalies. Glimpses of the latent condition, surfacing.

For many of us, there is a prior trust. A trust in something larger than the human story — a divine ordering, a universe that is not random but purposeful, a Reality that holds us even when we cannot see how. The trust that when we arise sincerely to exert our energies, unseen forces move in response, strengthening and sustaining what our own efforts alone could not achieve. This is not the trust that demands proof before it gives itself. It is the trust that, once given, begins to find the proof everywhere — in the unexpected door that opens, in the stranger who arrives at precisely the right moment, in the sense that the arc of things, however long and however difficult to trace, is bending toward something good. It does not remove the hard days. But it reframes them — as energy gathering behind what we cannot yet see. And that makes the hard days not only bearable but meaningful.

I believe Popova’s trust speaks to this. This trust — in human goodness, in a purposeful universe — is not something we manufacture. It is potential energy, already present in every human encounter, waiting to be released by whoever is willing to go first. The one who extends trust before it has been earned is, in that moment, the one who sets the energy in motion.

Perhaps then cynicism is not the absence of hope, but rather the withdrawal of trust. The possibility is still there — the cynical person can often see it quite clearly. What they have stopped believing is that it is actually reachable.

So in my final analysis, hope is not something we generate from nothing. We are simply nurturing what is already there — keeping our vision clear, our pathways open, our agency alive, and the people around us close. Hope and trust continuously renew each other. Each one makes the other more possible.

And when we do that — even imperfectly, even on the hard days — something shifts. Hope, it turns out, was never absent. It was simply waiting for us to begin.

I wrote this article in dialogue with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. The concepts, experiences, and convictions are mine. Claude helped me find the clearest way to say them. I found the collaboration generative — and, in the spirit of this essay, want to acknowledge its contribution.

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