At Urban’s MultiCulti Retreat in August 2025 — a day for student equity and inclusion leaders to gather and plan for the year — students brainstormed a theme to guide them through the school year. After much deliberation, they decided on the phrase “radical hope,” or the idea of remaining hopeful when the world urges pessimism.
Being hopeful about the world may feel more radical to young people now than it did just five years ago. In 2026, we find ourselves in the midst of increasing political turmoil, race- and gender-based violence, and tyranny and fascism in the U.S. government. We must work persistently to incorporate radical hope into our daily lives through education and civic engagement.
Since August, that phrase has trickled through Urban’s hallways and into all-school meeting announcements, emails, posters and even Urban’s official Instagram page. “With audaciously radical hope,” Head of School Quinton P. Walker wrote in January, signing off an email to the school. During this year’s Month of Understanding (MOU), the phrase seemed to be everywhere, repeated constantly despite little explanation of what radical hope actually means.
To some, being hopeful right now feels not just radical, but foolish. “I think people assume that just by being hopeful, you’re being ignorant and just don’t understand the tragedies of the world around you,” said Kaya Downs ’27, who co-leads the Women of Color affinity group. “It’s almost like people see radical hope as blind optimism.”
But we cannot let radical hope lose its significance, even after hearing the phrase hundreds of times. As the United States provokes many of its citizens toward despair, being hopeful has become its own form of protest.
Angela Davis, American political activist and academic, discussed the practice of creating hope in a 2025 interview with social psychologist Robert Livingston. “Hope is not just an emotion that is occasioned by what happens in the world. It is a discipline that has to be developed. It has to be created. It has to be produced. It has to be reproduced,” she said. “We owe it to those who came before us and to those who are coming after us to guarantee that ‘a luta continua’ [‘the fight continues,’ in Portuguese].”
Jessie Kaplan-Maier ’27 also sees value in finding hope amid struggle. “If you’re in too dire of a state to see a future, you’re not going to be able to manifest that future,” she said.
Urban’s approach to radical hope during MOU emphasized cultural celebration. Several events, such as Food as Stories, Jazz! and Food From North to South, successfully showcased joyful cultural traditions around food and music. “A lot of the events were very well thought through,” MultiCulti open member Paloma Seligman ’28 said. “I think it’s really great that we all have this one thing [radical hope] that we’re holding on to during such a difficult time.”
The emphasis on fostering radical hope through celebration can certainly be powerful. But to create genuine and lasting hope amid political distress, Urban must first make a more concerted effort to acknowledge contemporary issues. Lasting hope can only emerge from a complex understanding of political conflicts and oppression. If Urban truly believes in the importance of creating radical hope, it cannot continue to ignore what is happening in the world.
The second Trump administration’s actions since January 2025 have jeopardized many young people and their communities, putting their safety at risk and their futures in question. During his first month in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive action limiting diversity, equity and inclusion activities by the government. That same month, another executive action attacked transgender healthcare and attempted to redefine biological sex as binary and unchangeable. This January, the number of immigrants in detention in the United States reached a record high of 70,000 — despite civilian protests across all 50 states.
Urban underacknowledges some political topics — including tensions that impact school community members, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict and violence at the Minneapolis Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Though lunchtime events have addressed many such topics, Urban does not always provide consistent opportunities for education and discourse around them.
“At some point, Urban prioritizes sensitivity over genuine education for the students,” Downs said. “But I’m in favor of embracing controversial topics. … Being political and being an activist is innately intertwined with being educated.”
Downs said that some of Urban’s student-run political discussion events, such as the January 2025 Presidential Inauguration Debrief, have helped her find hope. As we encounter more and more national political calamities, the school must pick up its pace in addressing current issues with students.
In order to do so, Urban should continue incorporating contemporary issues into its curriculum. Classes such as Race in Latin American History, Constitutional Law and Infectious Disease often include discussions on national and international contemporary issues. But curricular discussions of current events do not have to stop at politically focused history- and social science-related courses.
More classes should find ways to include current national politics in their curricula. Offering interdisciplinary educational approaches to national and global issues will enable students to understand what it means to be hopeful right now.
MultiCulti leaders are in the process of forming a current events subteam in charge of spearheading whole-school events in response to the changing political climate. Intending to quickly respond to impactful events — and to provide multiple formats of discussion to suit students’ differing needs — the task force has real promise for enabling students to discuss and educate themselves on current issues.
Brayden Wright ’26, a MultiCulti open member, is one of the students helping lead the current events team. “I think it’s good to have a space where we can reflect as a community in a healthy and natural way,” he said.
Wright also shared his experience attending Latinos Unidos’ (LU) Deportation & ICE event during MOU. The event responded to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) actions in an educational format. Precisely because it confronted current issues through an informative and honest lens, the event was a strong moment for MOU’s goal to create radical hope.
“It was uplifting, knowing that there were people dedicating their lives to help out this problem that they felt passionate about, and it made me want to do more,” Wright said.
Urban should continue to encourage students to be civically engaged beyond MOU and classes. Nearly two-thirds of the student body attended the Jan. 30 school walkout protesting ICE actions, and faculty and administrators did not penalize them. Though they perhaps overstepped with their close supervision of the non-school-sponsored event, the adult support was nevertheless heartening — it indicated an understanding that civic engagement is necessary to understand the world around us and to create hope.
“[O]ur school has a longstanding tradition of making space for students to exercise their commitment to advance and participate in a pluralistic democracy,” Walker wrote in an email to students, parents and faculty on Jan. 29. “Each of you is a part of a community that remains committed to engaging the world around us through a belief in the capacity of young people to shape it.”
Supporting civic action within the Urban community is critical for facilitating hope. We cannot consider ourselves free of our responsibility to civically engage after sanctioning one student walkout; advocating against fascism and violence is a perpetual struggle that we must now undertake with more rigor than ever. Over the next months and years, students should continue to search for ways to advocate for what they believe in, and adults should support students’ safety — while still allowing them to be independent — and respect their desire to engage.
Urban claims to value the voices of young people, and it upholds that value through its commitment to education, student leadership and youth initiative. But if we want to create hope in 2026, we need to do more. We need to offer ways for students to engage in healthy, open discourse and reemphasize the importance of educating ourselves. We need to understand our rights and support one another’s efforts to create change. To find hope, we need to let ourselves be radical.