In collaboration with University Ministry, The Lane Center designed and facilitated “Educating for Hope” (E4H), a yearlong formation opportunity for faculty and student-facing staff to support them in accompanying students and cultivating the Common Good at USF. The program included shared meals and discussions, as well as transformative experiences such as retreats, symposia, and immersions, to help participants understand how the Ignatian tradition can help us reimagine and strengthen USF student experiences.

The program was grounded in, and familiarized participants with, the Jesuits’ four Universal Apostolic Preferences: Showing the Way to God; Walking With the Excluded; Caring for Our Common Home; and Journeying With Youth in co-creating a hope-filled future. What follows are reflections from some of the participants who built community and were empowered to accompany students, together, toward a hope-filled future. Each responded to three prompts with passion and appreciation for the ways in which E4H helped them to better recognize signs of hope, to sustain that hope, and to cultivate hope in their work and lives. One word recurred throughout the conversation: home. Each person described hope as intimately tied to a feeling of home—of mutual support and belonging. For all, USF is where a feeling of home is evoked, created, and sustained. As Evelyn described, “While our students are here, this is their home. It’s not just their school. It is where we all feel safe. We are co-creating home.”

5 E4H participants who joined the conversation include: Erin Brigham, director of the Lane Center; Angélica Quiñónez, director of University Ministry; Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez, associate professor of Sociology and 2023–24 Lane Center Faculty in Residence; Joseph Nguyen,  SJ., assistant professor of Theology; Ellen Kelly, director of Career Success; and Mark Miller, associate professor of Theology.

Where are you seeing signs of hope?

All of the participants affirmed that they observed the strongest signs of hope in their students. Ellen works with many first generation students of color who “have fostered just a real sense of camaraderie among themselves and with our team; they support each other, hold each other up. Even when we had to say goodbye to one of our students who got an offer she couldn’t refuse to attend another university, we put aside our sadness and celebrated. I see our office as a safe space, a haven.”

Evelyn invoked one of their field trips as a site of hope. The participants spent a day in Half Moon Bay with ALAS (Ayudando Latinos A Soñar—Helping Latinos Dream), an organization founded by a USF colleague, Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga. ALAS is dedicated to workingn for social wellness—through multicultural practices, mental health care, individualized and collective support related to education, immigration processes, and work—and advocating for the well-being of the whole community. She was awed by the “success of the program—how they grow hope by practicing support in whole and complete ways.” Evelyn went on to describe the group’s experience and what they learned about the organization’s origins in “women who wanted to serve farm worker communities but who hadn’t met each other yet. All of these good people just conveyed such a sense of faith by coming through, sharing the same love for this community, and helping to make this place and this sense of family a real thing.” Every time she looks at the piñata that she made at ALAS (which believes that supporting creativity is as essential to wellness as other practical matters), Evelyn remembers the thriving community model she encountered and is inspired to bring that sense of hope and possibility back to USF, “seeing each other on the same team, working together to grow hope.” Serving as a “touchstone,” ALAS reminds her that “we can get through what we need to, working together and creatively, as a university community.”

Angélica recognized hope in a student who made it possible for 12 asylum seekers to be housed at USF. Inspired by her internship with the city, “Not only did she manage to secure housing, but her efforts led to the creation of more internship opportunities for future USF students. She saw a problem and decided to do something.” Angélica also sees signs of hope within “pockets of the community, for example, the ways we make a home for and nurture international students. One of our University Ministry students who just finished his master’s thesis had 14 UM staff members and resident ministers show up to support him. When he was finished, he said, ‘You know my family’s not here, but you guys are my family.’”

Father Joe expanded our ideas about how we encounter hope when he focused on how what is hidden made manifest. He offered two examples: signs of resistance and attendance at daily mass. “Oftentimes, we think about hope and signs of hope as something that we see positively, as something positive happening. But in my reflection, hope is also something that is hidden, something that is not that positive. The resistance movement to the Israel–Hamas war is happening on many campuses, including ours; it’s a sign of hope to see that war is inhumane. Another is how we pray for peace at our daily mass, to have the courage to believe that prayer can contribute to creating peace.”

How are you sustaining a feeling of hopefulness?

To cultivate and sustain hope, all the participants affirmed that programs like E4H are essential because of the ways in which they build community. Beginning with a retreat at Mercy Center where they focused on the first Apostolic Preference—to show the way to God—participants laid the foundation for community and collaboration by sharing their individual stories of how they came to embrace education as a calling. All observed how humanizing it was to hear everyone’s journey toward their profession because no one followed a straightforward trajectory.

As Evelyn offered, “To get the backstory and understand that these perfect colleagues have also experienced confusion during their journeys was reassuring.”

Mark observed that just committing to the yearlong experience, making it a priority and showing up, even with competing claims on their attention, was “a beautiful and hopeful thing. We engaged each other as collaborators,” a point supported by Erin who emphasized “the power of community and longing for connection in vulnerability. How we showed up for each other and went deeper into compassion and connection with others who are hopeful and consoling continues to sustain us and illustrate the power of community to foster hope.

Erin was also lifted up by students who shared at the E4H Symposium, and how coming out of the pandemic they articulated their longing for community. “They showed great courage in their willingness to be vulnerable, and we were gratified that they felt accompanied at USF. It’s amazing to be part of that.”

Some students prepared essays on hope and accompaniment in preparation for the symposium. Selected essays are included in this volume. What was born on the first retreat continued in other gatherings, on and off campus. Whether during a shared meal or while riding in a van to Star Route Farms, all felt the desire to be together, appreciating that authentic friendships that included more than just work were taking hold and would sustain them throughout the year. They become co-creators in building a common home. Ellen echoed this sentiment, affirming that the way to sustain hope is “to keep showing up for people, keep engaging people that we encounter on campus into conversations. And if we can go a little bit deeper other than the cursory ‘How are you?’ Many of us have worked here for a long time, and what keeps me is the relationships with people, and those started when I started showing up and started fostering those relationships. Even today, this conversation is an example. I’m not feeling my best and considered not joining in, but I told myself, ‘Wait a second, Ellen. You really like these people. They bring you joy. They contribute to your well-being. So I just said to myself, ‘I’m gonna hop on.’ And I’m so glad I
did, because I feel like I can show up and be myself.”

Picking up on Father Joe’s comment that hope is often hidden, Evelyn suggested that being around people who are searching for hope also sustains hope. Faculty often gather for what she described as a “pity party. It is so stressful when all we share is what is overwhelming us. But if we can name one wonderful thing, then everything changes. It’s so consoling to be in a group of people who are all searching for hope. We can acknowledge that it feels a little
shadowy and dark sometimes but also that we can search for hope together.” Father Joe concluded by returning to reflect on how hearing everyone’s personal call to vocation sustained his hope, along with the Spirit that led everyone there. Describing the diverse elements of the program, he offered that “it is not so much the content of what we share, but the kind of the space that we create so that we can share.”

How do you cultivate feelings of hope in your classroom, scholarship, or work?

Having generated so much collective energy and inspiration from each other, E4H participants discussed how that translated into how they approach their respective roles at USF, how hope is reconstituted in their vocations. There was a general acceptance that what matters is not what educators do, precisely, but what they hope to accomplish and how they endow students with tools to apply after they have left the classroom.

Evelyn, admitting that she knew the least about about Ignatian spirituality before joining the program, declared that after her encounter with the Spiritual Exercises, she found the freedom to not only explore and express her own feelings of consolation and desolation but in a “kind of nonintimidating, invitational way,” to also allow students to share their feelings about what they were learning and encountering in the classroom. “I never considered asking ‘how did this course make you feel,’ or ‘what feelings were notable for you,’ to go into that space as they prepare to share feedback.” As a result, Evelyn crafted a new course evaluation practice that focused on students’ feelings. She further invited them into a deeper discernment through group sharing and reflection so they could learn from each other.

Erin did something similar in academic advising for students in the St. Ignatius Institute. Reflecting on all they shared about their journeys, which just had a lot of twists and turns and surprises, she “was inspired to conduct a group advising session. Because they already know the requirements that they need for this program, they didn’t need much advising about courses. But in the group advising session, we could step back to think about the why behind what you know. Why you’re here, why you chose your major. Many had changed their majors multiple times. And it was so reassuring to the new students to observe that kind of movement around a decision. It was comforting to appreciate that we’ve all had surprises and twists and turns. I even shared my own with them. It’s okay to be uncertain and to trust that there’s a hopeful future.”

Father Joe, recognizing what many observed about the high levels of anxiety among students, has included more opportunities for reflection among students. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by a huge writing project, he created a symposium where students could redact and share one or two key points from shorter papers and invite the rest of the class to reflect and respond on what was shared. As a result, by the time we get to the final paper, they have an idea of how to write a longer paper based on those short papers and are more comfortable presenting a longer argument. They also learn from each other as a form of enlightenment that I learned from Zen Buddhism. Enlightenment is not something that you don’t know and suddenly, you know; rather, it’s like coming home. You always know this thing, but now you know it deeper, differently. To accomplish this takes reflection.”

In University Ministry programs, Angélica used a technique they practiced on E4H retreats. Recognizing that the learning doesn’t end after the experience, she and her staff added the Ignatian Examen to student and staff retreat experiences, paying particular attention to identifying where they found hope today. Students are often bereft of hope, “because of climate change, political situations, any number of things, so University Ministry staff have begun asking “What really is the purpose of our programs?” Rather than just giving them this moment of let’s relax, refresh, rejuvenate on a retreat, we also focus on the goal. ‘What do we want them to take with them?’ We believe that if these students can incorporate something into their practice at least daily like, let me find one little moment of hope, then that’ll become common practice when they’re going through all the messy stuff in life. Take something with you. It’s not just about the moment and it’s not just about the retreat high.”

Ellen’s work in career services adapts all of what is mentioned before—reflection, breaking big projects into smaller, more manageable tasks, offering tools to apply in the future. Advising students on how to approach their future, Ellen states that “our office is all about hope and giving hope to students and breaking it down into the smallest steps. Instead of thinking, ‘What am I gonna do after I graduate? How am I gonna get an internship? How can you help me?’ I try to reframe the process for students. I tell them yes, we can help you. Let’s start by making an appointment. I also think it matters how we communicate with students. We should be beacons of hope. If they’re coming to us, then there’s got to be a spark of hope in them that there’s help out there. And so our hope and their hope are two sparks that can come together to ignite something bigger.” Ellen also offered that for all the participants, hope was a prerequisite for being an educator. “If we didn’t have hope, we wouldn’t be doing the jobs that we are doing, no matter what the state of the economy, or anything else. I consider myself a cheerleader, even if oftentimes I am the bearer of reality, too.”

Returning to the concept of home, Father Joe commented that what they built over the year of participating in E4H evoked a memory of home that became the context for their collaborative learning and sharing. This image was powerfully amplified when they traveled to Star Route Farms and widened their perspective to consider their common home and all the many ways our environment nourishes us and “helps us to connect with the thing that matters to us.” Like in cultivating nature, the E4H group recognizes that whatever labor they put into the program, there is also a “sense of mystery” about how it all came together and how it will influence their lives going forward.

Speaking for all, Father Joe affirmed, “While we try our best, we also trust in the Holy Spirit.” Erin summed up the takeaway of Educating for Hope with this advice: “Savor graces where they emerge.”

KIMBERLY RAE CONNOR, professor emerita in the School of Management. She is also a trained spiritual director
for the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.