It’s hard to find reason for hope in the midst of a seemingly endless deadly pandemic, increasingly irreversible climate catastrophe, growing inequality, and massive geopolitical unrest. Americans have felt fearful, lonesome, worried, and overwhelmed over the past year and a half—and yet they are notoriously optimistic. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 64% of Americans feel rosy about the future. The last time the nation’s collective outlook was anywhere near that was in 2006, a full decade and a half ago.
“The greatest change we’ve seen in this country has been after periods of social unrest,” said Caryl Stern, executive director of the Walton Family Foundation, on Tuesday at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C. “We’re in a window of opportunity, and I am so excited by the possibility of that opportunity.”
Young people are also motivated to make change, said Stern. An Echelon Insights study commissioned by the Walton Family Foundation found that two-thirds of millennials and Gen Zers believe that the American dream is achievable, and half said that they expected to live a better life than their parents. “We didn’t expect to hear that,” said Stern.
Tabassum Zalotrawala, global chief development officer at Chipotle Mexican Grill, found a similar sentiment brewing among her company’s employees. A survey completed this year found that morale at Chipotle was at an all-time high. “People inspire each other,” she said, even during difficult times.
And it’s not just sentiment: People are taking action. Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said 50,000 new volunteers have signed up in the past few weeks to help immigrants settle into their new homes. “That’s the America that realizes that we’re a nation of immigrants, and they want to help out.”
“Everyone wanted to show how resilient we can be, but also people wanted to figure out how to help one another,” said Sherrie Westin, president of Sesame Workshop.
Resilience, said the panelists, was the key trait that will generate optimism, along with the drive to work toward a brighter future even when faced with exceedingly brackish waters. Teaching resilience to young children, who have spent their formative years in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, is the key challenge educators and families must now tackle.
Teaching children to identify negative emotions is the key to moving past them, said Westin.
To move forward, added Stern, we should look back. Of the Greatest Generation that led the post–World War II boom, she said, “They too have that optimism, and yet I don’t see us looking back and asking what they did and what we can do to capture that,” she said. “We’re not teaching followship [the practice of doing what other people suggest, rather than taking the lead]; we’re not teaching collaboration…We have forgotten what it means to bring the nation together, and we’re seeing the results of that at home.” In the coming year, Stern said, the Walton Family Foundation plans to fund programs that put those lessons back into the classroom.
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