Relationships
Safe and supportive relationships within the family and with other children and adults.
- A caregiver who listens
- A trusted teacher
- A neighbor who notices
- A peer who offers belonging
Find your place
What brings you by today?
You do not need to know which community you belong to. Choose the statement that sounds closest, and we will guide you from there.
Y'all Means All!
Whatever shape your family takes, and whoever shares the work of care, there is room for you here.
Parents & Caregivers
For every person who shares in the life and care of a child.
Practitioners & Partners
For people who support families through programs, services, and community work.
Peers, Researchers & Colleagues
For people studying the evidence, shaping systems, or learning alongside us.
From adversity to possibility
We do not simply teach people to be resilient. We grow the conditions that allow people to thrive.
Conditions for thriving grow through connection, belonging, agency, healing, and opportunity.
Growing HOPE helps families, organizations, and communities put the Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences framework into practice. Together, we identify what is already strong, strengthen the relationships and environments that protect well-being, and create pathways for belonging, agency, healing, and opportunity.
The shared question
ACEs helped us understand the problem. HOPE helps us build the response.
Adverse experiences help us understand what can cause harm. The Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences, or HOPE, framework helps us ask the next question:
What do people, families, and communities need in order to experience safety, connection, belonging, agency, healing, and opportunity?
HOPE is a strengths-based, flexible framework for prioritizing equitable access to positive childhood experiences. Growing HOPE helps translate that foundation into relationships, environments, policies, practices, and community systems.
Official HOPE key termsWhat Is HOPE?
Official HOPE foundationPositive experiences are not extras. They are protective.
The HOPE framework, developed through the HOPE National Resource Center and its research and practice base, centers key positive childhood experiences that help children grow into healthy, resilient adults and can lessen the effects of adversity.
Environment
Safe, equitable, and stable environments where children can live, learn, and play.
- Stable housing
- Welcoming schools
- Accessible parks
- Reliable transportation
Engagement
Opportunities for social and civic engagement that develop a sense of belonging and connectedness.
- Parent advisory groups
- Faith communities
- Youth leadership
- Community coalitions
Emotional Growth
Opportunities for emotional growth where children feel supported through difficult events and emotions.
- Naming emotions
- Being supported through conflict
- Making choices
- Storytelling and reflection
HOPE does not erase adversity.
HOPE allows communities to hold two truths at once: people may experience real harm and hardship, and positive experiences can still be intentionally created, strengthened, and protected.
Already present
HOPE is already growing here.
Every community contains people, traditions, spaces, relationships, and everyday practices that support well-being. Growing HOPE helps communities recognize, strengthen, and organize around the HOPE already present.
Maternal and infant healthParent leadershipEarly childhoodSchoolsSubstance misuse preventionRecovery and behavioral healthFaith and community partnershipsRural community developmentCoalition buildingPolicy and systems change
How the systems fit together
Kimberly MethodDistinct contributions. One practical direction.
Growing HOPE brings several bodies of knowledge into relationship without treating them as interchangeable. Each layer answers a different question, and together they help communities move from values to visible practice.
01Foundation
HOPE + Positive Childhood Experiences
Name the relationships, environments, engagement, and emotional growth experiences people should be able to access.
What protective experiences are we growing?02Orientation
Science of the Positive
Begin with the positive that is real, present, measurable, and worth strengthening.
What is already working?03Narrative
Positive Community Norms
Where a real misperception exists, test whether accurate local data changes it before scaling the message.
Which norm is misperceived, and how will we know?04Participation
Community Wisdom + Assets
Treat families and community members as leaders, designers, researchers, and decision-makers.
Who already holds trust, knowledge, and capacity?05Systems Map
Watershed + Regenerative Thinking
See upstream conditions, downstream effects, stewardship, feedback, and interdependence.
What conditions shape the whole system?06Practice
Growing HOPE
Translate the frameworks into tools, decisions, tests, implementation, learning, and shared ownership.
What will we build, try, learn, and sustain?Protective experiencesPositive realityHealthy normsCommunity leadershipUpstream conditionsTestable practice
The Growing HOPE Approach
Kimberly MethodA practical cycle for community-led learning and systems change.
Kimberly Ladd helps partners translate, integrate, and implement HOPE through listening, facilitation, strategic alignment, parent leadership, carefully tested social-norms strategies, evaluation, and long-term community infrastructure.
Listen
Begin with lived experience, community wisdom, stories, relationships, and local context.
Discover
Identify existing positive experiences, protective practices, community assets, and healthy norms.
Align
Connect organizations, systems, partners, and resources around shared conditions for thriving.
Grow
Strengthen what is already working and create new opportunities for relationships, belonging, engagement, safety, and emotional growth.
Learn
Use reflection, stories, data, and community-led inquiry to understand what is changing.
Sustain
Build leadership, shared ownership, policy alignment, local capacity, and long-term community infrastructure.
Growing HOPE may include
HOPE-informed organizational assessment, community conversations and listening circles, parent and family leadership, coalition development, tested social-norms strategies, storytelling, training and facilitation, strategic planning, partnership development, evaluation and community-led research, policy and practice alignment, and regional HOPE hubs.
From readiness to learning
Working HypothesisHOPE becomes real through a visible practice cycle.
Official HOPE guidance describes a flexible framework that can inform individual, organizational, and community practice. Growing HOPE proposes this readiness path for shaping culture, planning, policy, program design, community engagement, and evaluation. It should be tested and adapted with real partners.
Orient
Build shared language around HOPE, existing strengths, and the change people want to make.
Assess
Notice readiness, internal culture, policies, relationships, community voice, and current assets.
Aim
Choose a specific audience and write a clear, inclusive, measurable aim.
Act
Run the smallest useful test with defined roles, decision rights, and a visible next step.
Learn
Pair existing data with stories and feedback so measurement does not become a burden.
Adapt
Document what changed, what traveled well, and what the community wants to sustain.
Measure what matters
Use evidence without adding unnecessary burden.
Start with information people already collect. Pair numbers with lived experience and stories. Measure relationships, belonging, agency, access, participation, and protective conditions, not only problems. Use what is learned to improve the next test.
Individuals and Families
Explore Your HOPE.
This is not a test, diagnosis, or measure of whether someone is a good parent. It is a reflective tool for noticing strengths, identifying unmet needs, and imagining possibilities.
Open the reflection toolWho helps you feel seen, supported, and safe?
Think of anyone who listens without judgment, checks in, helps with practical needs, or makes it easier to be yourself. One reliable person is a meaningful place to begin.
Where do you experience belonging?
Belonging can grow at home, with friends, in a faith community, at school, at work, online, or in a neighborhood space where you feel welcomed and remembered.
What places help your body and mind settle?
Notice spaces that feel predictable, calm, accessible, and physically safe. A porch, library, park, familiar room, or community gathering place can all count.
Where do you have meaningful choices?
Meaningful choice may be as simple as deciding how to spend time, asking for what you need, setting a boundary, or having a real voice in decisions that affect your family.
How do you participate, contribute, or lead?
Consider the ways you share an idea, help a neighbor, care for someone, join a group, make something, advocate, volunteer, or bring lived experience to a decision.
What positive experiences would you like more of?
Choose one experience that would make life feel more connected, steady, joyful, or possible. A small next step toward it is enough; this reflection is not a score or a judgment.
Do our environments communicate safety, dignity, stability, and belonging?
Look beyond stated values. Notice signage, language, privacy, accessibility, consistency, sensory comfort, and whether people can see themselves and their communities reflected in the space.
Do families and community members have meaningful roles in decision-making?
Ask where lived experience can change a decision, budget, policy, or program. Participation is more meaningful when people know their authority, are supported to contribute, and can see what changed.
Do our policies increase agency or unintentionally remove choice?
Review one common policy from the perspective of the person most affected. Where can you offer transparent options, preserve dignity, explain the reason for a limit, or create a fair path for exceptions?
Are we measuring positive experiences and protective conditions?
Alongside needs and risks, consider whether you can notice trusted relationships, belonging, participation, emotional support, access to safe places, and the choices people are able to make.
Do our services connect people to one another, or only connect people to programs?
A referral can meet an immediate need. A warm introduction, peer connection, shared activity, or continuing relationship can also strengthen the social support that remains after a program ends.
How do staff members experience HOPE in the workplace?
Consider whether staff experience voice, belonging, psychological safety, supportive supervision, manageable expectations, opportunities to grow, and meaningful influence over the work they carry.
Organizations
Become more HOPE-informed from the inside out.
Schools, nonprofits, healthcare providers, coalitions, government agencies, and community organizations can align services, policies, staff culture, and community engagement around the conditions that help people thrive.
Services may include HOPE orientation and training, assessment, strategic planning, facilitation, staff reflection, parent and community engagement, program crosswalks, policy review, evaluation planning, and implementation coaching.
Communities
Growing local and regional HOPE ecosystems.
A HOPE hub is a connected network of people and organizations that intentionally grows positive experiences across a place. It does not have to be a new building or standalone organization. It can be an organizing structure that helps existing partners align their work around common protective conditions.
PeopleRelationshipsOrganizationsCommunity ConditionsSystems Change
Families, parent leaders, schools, childcare providers, healthcare providers, recovery organizations, prevention coalitions, parks, libraries, faith communities, local government, researchers, artists, businesses, youth, and elders all have a place in the ecosystem.
Areas of Work
Where HOPE becomes visible and practical.
Maternal and Infant Health
Use HOPE to reduce isolation, strengthen relational health, elevate parent leadership, connect families to resources, and improve the environments surrounding pregnancy, birth, infancy, and early parenthood.
Early Childhood and Families
Support the relationships, environments, engagement opportunities, and emotional-development experiences that help children and caregivers thrive.
Prevention and Recovery
Move prevention beyond fear-based messaging and individual behavior change by strengthening belonging, connection, purpose, protective community conditions, and carefully tested norm messages.
Rural Community Development
Help rural communities recognize their assets, strengthen local leadership, connect fragmented resources, and create locally grounded solutions.
Coalitions and Community Systems
Support coalitions in moving from isolated programs to shared strategy, community ownership, and coordinated systems change.
Parent and Community Leadership
Treat people with lived experience as partners, leaders, researchers, designers, and decision-makers, not merely recipients of services.
Navigation and Resource Connection
Help directories, helplines, and community access points connect people not only to services, but also to relationships, belonging, agency, and positive experiences.
Research and Learning
Develop community-led research and evaluation practices that examine how HOPE is experienced, implemented, and sustained across families, organizations, and communities.
About Kimberly
Holding the whole.
Kimberly Ladd is a Tennessee-based community development and prevention leader, HOPE facilitator, HOPE Community Champion, coalition builder, strategist, and emerging community-led researcher.
Her work grew from lived experience as a mother navigating fragmented systems during her daughter's substance-use and pregnancy journey. That experience led her to convene community conversations, build a prevention coalition, and devote her work to understanding how families and communities create pathways toward healing and thriving.
Kimberly helps people hold the whole: to see the relationships between individual experience, family well-being, community conditions, organizational practices, and larger systems.
Kimberly's work is guided by the belief that communities are not empty vessels waiting for experts to fix them. They are living systems already filled with wisdom, relationships, culture, creativity, and possibility.
Growing HOPE Stories
Data helps us understand patterns. Stories help us understand meaning.
Growing HOPE honors both.
Parent voicesCommunity leadersHOPE in everyday lifeOrganizational transformationRural TennesseeNature, belonging, recovery, leadership, and intergenerational healing
Resources
A growing library for practice, reflection, and learning.
Every destination now identifies its knowledge boundary, intended audience, source trail, and practical use.
View the full resource libraryNew to HOPEWelcome to the HOPE ecosystemParent pathwayA place in the circle of careParent pathwayA circle of support for new mothersPractice pathwayPut HOPE into practiceResearch pathwayReview the evidenceOfficial foundationIntroduction to HOPEOfficial foundationFour Building Blocks guideKimberly MethodSystems integration mapWorking toolImplementation readiness reflectionWorking toolSMARTIE aim builderWorking toolLow-burden learning planTestable prototypeIndividual HOPE reflectionPrivate, non-scored reflectionAdversity and support reflectionWorking toolOrganizational HOPE assessmentWorking toolCommunity conversation guideIntegration noteHOPE and positive social normsEvidence review2026 evidence and claims guideApplication briefHOPE in maternal and infant healthApplication briefHOPE for coalitionsApplication briefParent leadership resourcesWorking toolResearch and evaluation toolsSourced libraryBooks, articles, videos, and partners
Work With Us
What could become possible if HOPE became part of how your community plans, serves, listens, measures, and grows?
Schedule a consultationHost a Growing HOPE conversationBring HOPE training to your organizationComplete a HOPE-informed organizational reviewExplore a regional HOPE hubPartner on a pilot projectCollaborate on research or evaluationSponsor a community initiative