Nebraska celebrates the International Day of Hope on Saturday, July 12, 2025 with a hope adventure from Omaha to Lincoln!
- Social media event links: Facebook
- 10am-12pm: Lincoln, NE. Hope prints at Constellation Studios.
- Music by Orion Walsh
- 3:30-6pm: Omaha, NE. Hope Illuminates Yates
- 4-6pm: Lincoln, NE. Hope at play: activities at LUX Center for the Arts
- Free and open to the public. All are welcome.
Prof. C.R (Rick) Snyder developed several scales to measure hope and described the contours of hope in several ways:
- “Hope is a perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.”
- “Hope is the sum of the mental willpower and waypower that you have for your goals”
- “Hope means you can get there from here.”
- “[H]ope… a cognitive set comprising agency (belief in one’s capacity to initiate and sustain actions) and pathways (belief in one’s capacity to generate routes) to reach goals…”
Beacons of Hope from the Heartland: Nebraska ranks 9th in wellbeing as a state. Omaha ranks 12th, and Lincoln ranks 6th in terms of wellbeing nationally at the city level.
Hope Quotes:
“There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be.” ~Robert Henri
“Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…” ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
Musings on Hope:
- If a person says yes to a value down to their core, that value then becomes a source from which an infinite number of meaningful goals can be derived.
- Values are a source of infinite hope.
- Hope emerges from play, the play of the imagination.
Nebraska is inscribed with hope thanks to the iconography of the philosopher, Hartley Burr Alexander.
- Left: SPES (hope) is on a door at the Joslyn Museum (Omaha, NE).
- Middle: The Sower represents generativity, a hope-based virtue, and is casting seeds of hope to the west from atop the Nebraska State Capitol (Lincoln, NE).
- Right: the virtue HOPE is located to the west on the ceiling of the rotunda in the Nebraska State Capitol (Lincoln, NE).