Amid all the challenges and conflicts in our world today, new research finds that hope can lead to positive social change (Leshem and Halperin, 2026). Research shows that hopeful people who feel more empowered are more likely to become more involved in community service and take action to help others (Schornik and colleagues, 2023 ).

Hope theory, the psychological definition of hope, involves three components:

Goals
Pathways or steps to reach our goals
Agency or motivation (Snyder, 1994)

New research shows that hope is most effective in promoting positive social change when:

1. Our goals are actionable and possible “when we desire something and have some expectation that our desires could be fulfilled” (Leshem and Halperin, 2026, p. 5).

2. Our hope not only brings us a sense of purpose, making us feel better, but also leads to positive action—moving forward with pathways and agency (Leshem and Halperin, 2026).

3. Instead of denying our negative emotions, we can let ourselves feel them, which can promote greater agency. As Leshem and Halperin explain, “negative emotions seem to provide the sense of urgency, uneasiness, or agitation that motivates people” to change the undesirable situation (2026, p. 7).

In fact, our recent research on “mindful hope” (Feldman, Shapiro, and Dreher, 2026) finds that grounding hope in mindfulness, which invites awareness of the present moment, can offer us a stabilizing and empowering foundation to explore hope by choosing effective pathways, developing our agency, and striving toward new possibilities.

Research has shown that we can actively build our hope by:

Setting a goal we can believe in and writing it down
Writing down three pathways—steps to reach our goal—followed by three obstacles we might encounter, and three alternative steps
Strengthening our agency by visualizing ourselves taking these steps, overcoming these obstacles, and reaching our goal (Feldman and Dreher, 2012).

Now it’s your turn. If you’d like to build greater hope to promote positive change in the world around you, you can first

Become more aware of your feelings about the current situation by asking yourself:

“What am I feeling?”
“What would I like to be different?”

This will help you set your goal.

Set Your Goal. There are so many problems in our world—hunger, homelessness, environmental damage, global warming, and more. New research describes how developing active hope can help us achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including health, education, economic growth, environmental sustainability, and more (Goetzke and O’Brien, 2026).

Set Up Your Pathways and Take Action. By choosing hope, instead of obsessing about problems in our world, we can see these problems as a menu of possibilities—choose one goal to work on, then set up our pathways and begin taking action. During a recent freeze in SNAP benefits, my neighbors and I set our goal as a local food drive. For our pathways, we put canned goods in brown bags in front of our houses, and then one neighbor came by, picked them up, and took them to our local food bank. This provided food for people who needed it and brought our neighborhood together with a new sense of agency, realizing that we can make a difference.

Build Your Agency. You can build your agency by:

Visualizing yourself taking the steps to reach your goal
Taking care of your health—getting enough sleep, healthy food, and exercise
Remembering a time you reached a goal in the past. Telling yourself “I did that then. I can do this now.”
Connecting with a friend and working on your goals together.
Repeating affirmations: “Yes, we can!”

The International Day of Hope Is July 12. You can build greater hope for yourself and our world by taking these steps:

Mindfully asking yourself how you’re feeling about what’s going on in the world, what you’d like to see instead
Then, setting a goal
Next, plan your pathways and begin taking them, one step at a time
Building your agency to keep moving forward

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By choosing hope, you can live with greater vitality and make a positive difference in the world.

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This post is for informational purposes and should not substitute for psychotherapy with a qualified professional.

© 2026 Diane Dreher. All Rights Reserved.