Hope Research Center | 2024 National Crime Victims' Service Awards

CHAN HELLMAN: Hope is the belief that the future will be better than today, and that we have the power

to make it so. 

ANGELA PHARRIS: Is hope a wish? No, no. We wish for things all the time. It's a cognitive process, it's a mindset.

CHAN HELLMAN: And the reason this is so important is because it helps us understand that hope can be taught. ANGELA PHARRIS: If you think about any program or service out there that supports a victim of crime, when that person walks in the door, hope has been activated. When we nurture somebody's hope, we're teaching them how to imagine themselves in the future. 

CHAN HELLMAN: Hope is very personal to me. I spent my youth from eighth grade throughout high school as a homeless youth. And so I spent my days focused on where am I gonna eat? Where am I gonna sleep? How am I gonna stay safe? And so as I came to the University of Oklahoma and established

the Hope Research Center, I began to understand that this important psychological strength and coping resource of hope was the very essence of my own survival. 

I mean, on the one hand we've had... 

So, we train the organizations around a hope-centered and trauma-informed model. 

TAMMY WILLIAMS: Our agency employs about 6,000 people. And our frontline staff are faced with secondary trauma on a daily basis. So, every time we speak to our workforce about hope science, we're giving them some tools and a little bit of protection against the things that they go face every day. 

ANGELA PHARRIS: It changes the way you interact from there on out. The future can be better than their past, and I can make that future possible. My organization has pathways to make that future possible. But the other thing is, it's really, really good for that worker. 

CHAN HELLMAN: We teach them how to nurture their own hope first. You cannot give what you do not have. So, in understanding how to nurture hope in staff, they can lend hope to the victims and survivors that they're serving. 

ANGELA PHARRIS: We can see things like intent to remain employed go up, burnout symptoms go down, 

and secondary trauma symptoms

be reduced. 

CHAN HELLMAN: Hope is such a fundamental part of who we are, what it means to be human. I want people to do it with intention, to be very intentional in nurturing the hope of those around us.