At the turn of the year, many of us pause to reflect on where we’ve been and where we need to go. I want to thank some who moved us forward this past year, and challenge others to help us move forward in 2012.

Thanks to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen — the three women who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for their leadership of nonviolent movements for peace and human rights. These women fought against war, violence and oppression, without compromise and at great personal risk. Those three women were in the news. The following thanks go to one who wasn’t: Margaret McKenna.

Four years ago, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. — the country’s biggest grocery chain — was giving away how much food to the hungry? Answer: none.

Today it gives away more food than all the other big grocery chains combined. Some food banks had no trucks to collect and deliver the food — Wal-Mart bought them trucks. As the cruel vise of economic slowdown and unemployment tightened, some of those who had been volunteering in local food banks lost their day jobs and became clients where they had been helping out. The timing for Wal-Mart’s act of generosity was providential. McKenna led the team at the Walmart Foundation that did all this.

And now the challenges for 2012:

1. President Barack Obama: Give us a road map bold enough to get out of the economic swamp we’re in. You see yourself as a bridge-builder; well, tell us what the big plan to get to the other side looks like. No more small bridges to nowhere that don’t span the gap.

2. Xi Jinping: As you assume leadership of the largest country on Earth, tell us you will put China on the road to a sustainable future for itself, and thus a sustainable planet for all of us. Face the need for limits on carbon emissions, for ending the mad orgy of coal-plant construction, and for careful water planning — in partnership with neighbors Vietnam, Cambodia and others whose futures depend on your actions.

3. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.: After years of running and amassing huge campaign war chests, lead us in the effort to get the poison of greed-driven money out of our politics. We are suffocating in a system where the rich use money to exercise disproportionate political influence. You have the authority, the wits and the power base to help us find a way out of this craziness before we leave your daughters and mine a republic that is rotten at the core.

4. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: At this moment of drift and despair, there is a role for a thoughtful conservative who understands what it will take to reverse the downward economic spiral in which we’re caught. Why don’t you try the Churchillian role on for size? Speak truth in the midst of confusion; describe the path we need to take when no one else dares to. You might find that millions are ready to listen to you.

5. Bill Moyers: You have served as pastor, White House aide, reporter, editor and TV host. Yours is the strongest, truest voice of our generation. Give us two sermons a year on where we are, where we need to go, and the values we need to cleave to in order to get there. Write and record those sermons — the rest of us will spread them everywhere virally.

6. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo: As governor, you’ve pulled the state back from the brink of financial disaster. It’s time now for a bold capital investment program that will move New York to the front of the pack in jobs and growth. (That $1 billion you announced as part of the tax agreement counts only as a small down payment.)

In trouble or not, we Americans have more to be thankful for than most. Let us act on that, thoughtfully and generously.

Peter Goldmark, a former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund. He wrote this for Newsday on Long Island, N.Y.