By Loren McCullough, 5/19/21, positiveexperience.org/blog
Last month, Jane Stevens, founder and publisher of PACES Connection introduced us to the Hope Research Center at The University of Oklahoma. We had a fascinating hour-long call with director Chan Hellman and his team. It turns out that hope itself promotes resilience and well-being, and that their work on the cognitive process of hope aligns so well with our work on HOPE – Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences. In order to share the excitement of that call with everyone else, we interviewed Chan Hellman and Angela Pharris for this blog.
Please introduce yourselves and your work to our readers.
CH: I’m Chan Hellman, and I’m a professor at the University of Oklahoma in the Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work, and the director of the Hope Research Center.
AP: I am Angela Pharris, and I am a research fellow in the Hope Research Center.
CH: For the last 20 years, we have been focused on measuring outcomes and impact of program services responding to families experiencing crisis. About 12 years ago, I was introduced to this idea of ‘hope’. It was really an interaction that I had with an individual who was experiencing a lot of adversity. As he was sharing his story with me, I kept looking for those things that must be wrong with him—depression, anxiety, etc. Interestingly enough, he did not display any of that. He started to talk about his future goals of going to college. It struck me in that moment that as a psychologist, I had spent my career focused on what is wrong with people, and [he] helped me understand that we should be focused also on strengths. What we’ve learned is that hope, as a psychological strength and coping resource, allows individuals to move through the adversity in their life, but also to potentially overcome that adversity. That is really the focus of the Hope Research Center, to understand how childhood trauma and adversity rob us of our capacity for hope, and how program services in the communities can nurture and restore hope for children and families.
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