Angela R. Logan, PhD
St. Andre Bessette Academic Director
Master of Nonprofit Administration
Associate Teaching Professor
Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame
Hope > Despair
Hello! As I write this, I am reflecting on a recent experience and wrestling with a question I’ve been pondering for the past three weeks. At the beginning of December, led by an international nonprofit, I embarked upon a ten day pilgrimage with members of my church, to study the principles and practices of peacemaking within the context of the Emerald Isles. Over the course of the trip, we traveled across Ireland and Northern Ireland, meeting with everyone from Benedictine monks to former paramilitary soldiers on both sides of The Troubles, and everyone in between. We visited with nonprofit leaders committed to reclaiming the Irish language, toured a working replica of the 19th-century vessel that carried Irish emigrants to North America fleeing the Great Irish Famine, and the largest stadium of the Gaelic Athletic Association (I even tried a wee bit of hurling).
As I sit here, thinking back over my trip, one question keeps coming. I suspect for many of you, you are also wrestling with the answer to this question. The question is simply this: What is my role in all of this?
As we wrap up the academic term, questioning who assigned all these projects and papers (okay, maybe that’s just me), while also making preparations for the start of the new term shortly after the Times Square ball drops, it can often feel like we are living on a perpetual hamster wheel (again, maybe that’s just me). The administrivia keeps piling up, with budget preparations, midyear performance evaluations of staff, and preparing preliminary reports of institutional leadership. And let’s not forget the political uncertainty in the US and abroad, and the implications that uncertainty will no doubt have on our sector, our students, and ourselves… We’re being asked to increasingly do so much more with so much less, while also trying to maintain a robust research agenda and preparing the next generation of nonprofit leaders. Whew…are you as tired reading that as I was typing it?!, And don’t get me started on the pressures of parenting, parenting your parents, or both, dealing with the realities of aging well, and just generally maintaining your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing! It’s enough to send an academic director to Jamaica (again, probably just me).
And yet, as I hold the tension between all the things on my to-do list and my experience on the pilgrimage to the Emerald Isles, I can’t help but be challenged to focus on the wider context of all of this, and ask myself: What is my role in all of this? In a world that often pushes us to choose between despair and hope, my role is to choose hope. And more importantly, my role, and dare I say our role, is to challenge our students to do the same.
Because wasn’t hope the genesis of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector? Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give humanity hope (in the form of light). The America that de Tocqueville saw was one in which the citizens of a new nation banded together to provide each other hope in spite of all that surrounded them. Social service agencies and schools were born in the United States to give hope to the formerly enslaved and recent immigrants who had every right to sink into despair. Generosity with the intention of understanding how to live in hope when the world seems to constantly push you towards despair.
Friends, as you slowly but methodically wrap up 2024, I encourage you to hold onto the hope. The hope will sustain us in the days to come, and will give us what we need to give our students what they need: the hope to foolishly believe they can, and will, make a difference in this world!
All the best,
Angela R. Logan
Board President, NACC