THE IMPORTANCE OF HOPE

July 17, 2020

In his election night speech in 2008, Barack Obama stood in front of tens of thousands in Chicago and spoke about the need for unity, for progress, for a better tomorrow, and said, “While we breathe, we hope.”

Hope is a fascinating idea. It’s rooted in intention, rooted in optimism that we can, and should, look forward to what’s coming. Hope is relentlessly positive, and supremely forward-thinking.

This year, 2020, is about as sucky as it gets. Millions out of work, millions sick, way too many who’ve died. And while we’re tired of COVID-19, and tired of wearing masks, it seems as if the disease is hardly tired of us. So while 2020 has given us very little reason for optimism, looking forward to what’s ahead doesn’t look much brighter, ether.

But while we breathe, we hope. We need things to look forward to. We need to, taking every safety measure necessary to silence this pandemic, find that relentless positivity, find reasons to be optimistic and find things to look forward to.

There have been a handful of moments since March when I’ve broken. The most indelible memory was the Monday before the North Carolina shutdown, when I was typing on these very pages and trying to share a message of hope and resilience for what was about to come. And after some 1,000 words, I accidentally deleted my post. In all my years writing Journals, and in my 5 years as a journalist, I had never just deleted something as I typed the final period. I was sitting in our “new” office we no longer have, across from Andrew and Dora, and basically broke into tears. I was trying to find hope, trying to project a reason to remain optimistic while everything was going the other way. I was swimming upstream and, just when I saw the finish, I was sucked back down. I closed my computer, buried my head into my hands and started to cry.

That moment wasn’t about losing 1,000 words. It was about losing hope, about recognizing something fading away from me that is at the core of who I am, of who Summit is. It took me a few hours to bounce back, but that moment, that erasure of my hope, lingered for weeks even while we fought to stay alive.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that hope isn’t just going to reappear. People are broken, scared, anxious about the economy and their health and the school year and their jobs and so much more. Hope takes action, it takes intention. And Summit is making an active choice to not only be hopeful, but provide hope.

This Friday morning, Olivia and Dora are down in Charlotte’s NoDa neighborhood to give away cups of coffee, say hello to our new community, and offer people a moment of some optimistic normalcy. As if to say, we’re still coming to town, to provide you this small thing to look forward to every day. Hope.

Broadening that approach explains why, in a summer where we’re still working from home and still unsure when customers can gather in our cafés, we’re still opening more. NoDa is next, and we have #5 lined up, too (surprise announcement coming soon!).

Much has been written about how the big corporations — Starbucks, Walmart, Amazon — are going to fatten their bellies a bit during this economic shift. Small businesses are going to close, because the average 3-weeks cash flow that most hold onto isn’t enough to survive months of revenue shortages. Because of this, we believe, there’s an added importance for companies who prioritize living wages, and sustainable sourcing, and social justice. For companies like Summit.

We want to provide hope to towns, to communities, that not all small businesses are going away. We want to provide hope to our Summit team that not only are your jobs safe, we’re creating more of them, and even better jobs. There’s good reason to have hope that Summit is growing, and that growth itself brings myriad other reasons to hope.

Hope isn’t blind. We know it’s risky, to swim upstream with no idea what conditions are going to be like when you get there. But hope is an intention for something great to happen, to help provide meaning to the now and something to look forward to.

In 2008, at the very outset of the worst economic crisis in a century, Barack Obama trumpeted the need for hope, that if we unite in the pursuit of a better future, we’ll come out at the other end. He trumpeted the idea of hope when it was so hard to see.

In 2020, we’re not trying to unite a world, but rather provide hope to our worlds. We fundamentally believe that more Summit cafés means richer communities, more opportunities to make a positive impact, more reason to remain hopeful. We’re more motivated than ever in our 22 years to grow, and more optimistic than ever that conditions have aligned for us to succeed, giving us all the motivation we need to look forward, to hope.