Reverend Stachelle D. Bussey
Louisville, Kentucky, USA
Hope is Not Cute
My message is about hope. Hope is not cute. We romanticize it a lot. And that’s why I started the Hope Buss because I wanted to take the cuteness out of it. I wanted to tell people that hope isn’t cute.
Hope, in my community—for people who look like me—is sometimes deciding which choice is harder, even though they are both hard choices. I want people to stop looking at hope as something that they can have. No. It’s gritty. It’s grief. It’s, “Am I going to get milk? Or, am I going to get gasoline?”
I don’t want people to romanticize hope. I want people to stop doing that—acting like it’s something you can just give. No. It’s not that. We are looking at people, we are looking at a society where hopelessness has infected everything that we do because people romanticize it. And when it’s not good, then it’s not hope. But that’s not true.
Actually, hope is like one hard choice after the other. Hope is working until it materializes, right? We are how it materializes.
God wants us to be in community. God wants people to live fully loved, fully known. Right? Comfortable. Not oppressed. He wants people to be free to be who they are. And so that’s what I want to tell people. Hope isn’t cute. Don’t romanticize it. It’s making one hard choice after the next hard choice, and then having just a little bit of light left. Having the one thing that is your life that says, “Today, instead of selling drugs, I’m going to get on a bus and get a job. Something different because I want to be here for my kids.”
The Louisvillians
This is one of the ten portraits of Louisvillians was curated by the Muhammad Ali Center in collaboration with several partner and community organizations to reflect the diverse fabric of our city.
Daniel’s Reflection
I met Reverend Stachelle Bussey as part of interviewing 10 community leaders for Portraits in Faith’s “Seeing the Other” exhibition at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. I was deeply moved by her journey growing up in the projects and questioning the disparity between the white and black parts of town and inequalities in the justice system. She had a short stint in the criminal justice system and in teaching but both disillusioned her. Reverend Bussey’s real calling is in ministry. She holds a Masters in Divinity from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and in 2025, earned a Ph.D. in Education and Social Change from Bellarmine University.
In 2018, she created The Hope Buss, a non-profit that was first focused on food insecurity by giving rides to people in food deserts to grocery stores. That project expanded to providing education, housing, mental health, and physical health programs. All of Reverend Bussey’s work can be summed up with the powerful quote in her interview: “Hope is not cute!” To her, giving people hope is the most practical thing that can be done. And when she speaks of hope, Stachelle Bussey is talking about the front lines of hope. Getting people gas to fill up their car. Getting people money so they can buy groceries. Giving unhoused people a safe place to sleep.
Reverend Bussey felt different and thought different from an early age. She questioned why, if God was all powerful, people were poor,people were dying. And she questioned why people were encouraged to tithe more as if they would receive more blessings that those who tithe less. So she was asking questions that young people were not supposed to be asking. She became a drummer and a musician which was unusual for a girl. People told her, “You’re different but you’re powerful.”
Her ministry changed dramatically with the murder of the unarmed Breonna Taylor who was killed by police who entered her apartment with a no-knock warrant. Stachelle Bussey became even more of an activist and a protest leader. Since then she has doubled her efforts to disrupt power systems that keep people oppressed because this is what she understands who Jesus was and what he did.
It was my great honor to meet someone of Reverend Stachelle Bussey’s caliber and purpose and raw power. She reminded me that “hope is not cute” and that help and hope must be practical. What an amazing Portrait in Faith.
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