Hopeful Cities started in 2020 in the city of Reno, and now the city of Las Vegas is implementing it.

The initiative is based on the belief that hope can be taught.

And its founder, Kathryn Goetzke, says research proves it's a lesson worth learning.

Okay, so we're going to talk about teaching hope.

But I first want you to take me through the hopelessness that you once experienced in your life and how it led to the development of Hopeful Cities.

(Kathryn Goetzke) So growing up, my dad had a lot of challenges and struggles.

But he was also super successful as a retail banker.

And when I was 18, he died by suicide.

And it was very traumatic for me.

I was super close to him as a freshman in college, and I struggled a lot.

I struggled with addiction, eating disorders, self harm, diagnosed with a number of things and had my own suicide attempt in my early 20s, which was actually shocking to me because, I knew how it felt when someone took their life.

It was devastating for me when I lost my dad.

And so I thought, how could someone do that to someone, and I realized suicide isn't something that you do to other people.

It's a real sense of what I've come to understand as hopelessness.

So both despair, feeling real despair and feeling helplessness, to do anything about that pain.

And so that really led me on my journey.

I developed my company about 20 years ago and started a nonprofit at that same time to first work on rebranding depression.

And started working on that about 10 years, got very engaged in a lot of global organizations--the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations--and was in a suicide prevention talk.

And they were talking about restricting access to means and 800 numbers as primary suicide prevention, and I knew that wouldn't save me.

I knew it wasn't going to save my dad.

And so doing literature reviews, hopelessness is the single consistent predictor of suicide.

And so I said, I better figure out what that is, and I better figure out how to get to hope.

And that's kind of what started me on that journey.

-How did you go about doing that?

-Well, you know, I thought, why don't I know what it is?

And I realized they were studying hope.

There were hope measures, hope scores.

-How did hope come on your radar-- -I thought-- - --as a priciple solution?

-I know.

I thought if hopelessness is your primary symptom of anxiety and depression and the single consistent predictor of suicide and also of violence-- -Is that connected to research?

-Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

It's been studied.

It's been, yeah, very proven.

So this is all secondary research that I did on my own, because what I was finding wasn't working for me.

And so, again, they were measuring hope and they were studying the outcomes as it relates to having higher hope.

So the higher, the more hope you have on this, it's an eight-question validated scale for adults called the Adult Snyder Hope Scale.

It's been around for a very long time.

-And part of Hopeful Cities?

-And part of Hopeful Cities.

You can measure your hope on our website, hopefulcities.org.

But the higher in hope you are, the more likely you are to graduate university.

The better grades you get, the better you do in sports, even more so than your abilities.

They've done research on this.

They've published studies.

They're all-- They're all available on our site.

But they knew the outcomes as it related to hope, but they weren't teaching you how to become more hopeful.

So I'm like, well, we have to do that.

And so I started with 10 lessons for young kids.

Then we moved to 12.

And now we have a lot more programming.

But it was really based on the hypothesis that you could teach hope and you could increase hope.

And as you increased hope, anxiety and depressive symptoms decreased.

-Wow!

This was first implemented in Reno.

-Yes.

-Why Reno?

And when and how has it gone there?

-So we started a couple of years ago during COVID.

So they got some funding through the Cares Act funding.

Mayor Hillary Schieve, she's amazing.

She's a big mental health advocate.

She's done wonderful work in the city of Reno.

And so we got some initial funding, and she said to me, You have a program in for kids for hope and you talk about hope.

Why don't you do something for the city like they do for kindness?

And so I thought, okay.

And so it's taken a couple years for me to really figure out how to activate a city in a way that's cost effective for the city, that you can really have impact and provide the resources.

So we've come up with a strategy for how to do that.

When we started at Reno, we had an event.

We painted murals, SHINE Hope murals.

We started talking about the skills.

We did PSAs.

We did a Hope challenge.

And we did curriculums for a lot of the kids.

So we sent out print workbooks, print, the Deep Dive program, the overview to a lot of the kids throughout the county.

So, yeah, it was really exciting.

And now I'm excited because I have a model that I think we can use around the world, really, for how to activate hope.

-So is it city based?

Are there differences between the plans based on the city?

-It's based on the size of the city, so the population.

So we basically set up a landing page.

There's a public health campaign.

You know, when we talk about hope, we often think of hope as a wish, a very abstract amorphous concept, not something that's like science based and driven.

So that's what the public health campaign, like hope does not equal a wish.

If you hope for something in life, you've actually got to feel good about it, and you've got to take steps to get there.

So a lot of our work is around, you know, how do we imagine manage our emotional despair, which is one part of helplessness.

But then how do we get from helplessness to action?

So a lot of goal setting, overcoming obstacles to goals, if we need to re-goal.

You know, hopelessness occurs, and it becomes-- we have hopelessness all the time, actually, moments of hopelessness.

You get cut off in traffic, you might experience a moment of hopelessness.

But it's really, it's how you manage that that matters.

And it's when it becomes persistent that it's a major problem.

But we're losing kids to suicide because of things like failing grades, and they experience hopelessness about it.

Breaking up, they experience hopelessness about it.

So it's really how do we manage our despair in that moment and how do we get from helplessness back to action?

-The community philanthropist Gard Jameson, he is responsible for funding the implementation of this with a $25,000 gift to the mayor's fund for Las Vegas LIFE.

We spoke with him at City Hall where a breakfast was held to announce this initiative.

He is also a philosophy professor at UNLV.

-He's amazing.

-Yeah, and he called hope "crucial to a meaningful life."

So we're going to hear from him on why he chose your initiative in particular.

And then he is followed by Mayor Pro Tem Brian Knudsen on why he thought this would be a good fit for the city of Las Vegas.

Let's listen.

(Gard Jameson) Because right now, the science of hope is at a fairly novel stage, and there are not a lot of people teaching hope.

And so when I was introduced to Kathryn and saw her programs, I realized, here's something that crosses all the age gaps and it crosses all the gaps in our community.

(Brian Knudsen) Everything I see right now, people are struggling with mental health issues.

I can guarantee that everyone watching this right now has some level of mental health challenge or they're around somebody who has a mental health challenge.

I think it's an absolutely critical time to remind people that there are resources available, and there are people who care about you, who need you, who love you, and the city is right there arm-in-arm with our community members helping people to know that there's hope out there.

-Okay, so tell me what's in this, because this is what people can actually go and download and begin to learn and teach.

-Absolutely, yeah.

So there's a landing page on the website, the hopefulcities.org website, a Las Vegas landing page.

And it has things like Your Hope Story, so a template for how you write your own hope story.

There's an infographic that goes through the SHINE Hope framework with links out to articles, the science of each of the things underneath the framework.

So SHINE stands for Stress Skills, so how we identify and manage our stress response; Happiness Habits, so how to practice those things that cultivate positive hormones and chemicals in our bodies; Inspired Actions, so kind of different types of goals we set, how we overcome obstacles, visualizing all of these things that are key for hope; Nourishing Networks, so how we cultivate strong healthy networks in our lives; and Eliminating Challenges, which are the thinking patterns that get in the way of our ability to hope, things like rumination, internalizing failure, worrying about the future, all of these things.

We have programming for young kids.

So we have an Overview, which is three lessons; we have a Deep Dive, which is 16 lessons.

You can download it, and you can literally start teaching anyone.

If you can read, they're in English.

If you can read English-- we have police teaching them.

I mean, they're available.

You could just start bringing it into a school system, after-school program, place of worship.

We have a Parent's Guide, so how to start using hope language at home.

You know, our parents' number one concern right now is the mental health of their children, and the kids are struggling.

So we've created this kind of universal language that normalizes hopelessness and then normalizes practicing skills to become more hopeful.

And the last thing we have is a teen program.

So it's a peer-to-peer teaching model.

You know, I always said, when we do our teen program, like I would not have learned from my parents about hope, or a teacher, but I would have loved learning with other teens and working with other teens about it.

-The one concern I did have is if there are maybe parents out there who have children that are struggling with mental health issues and they say, You know what?

You just need this.

You don't need professional help.

-Yeah.

-You don't need medicine.

-Yes, we are not doctors.

Talk to a doctor.

And there is a list of resources on the Hopeful City's website that Las Vegas has provided of local resources, therapists, organizations.

But yes, talk to your local doctor about it.

-Kathryn Goetzke, thank you for joining Nevada Week.

-Thank you so much for having me.

It's been a pleasure.