24 bright spots to inspire you in 2024
As a new year dawns, it’s hard not to feel anxiety about what’s coming next — from pivotal elections to technological and demographic change, from climate risks to governance lapses and racial reckoning. All this rapid change has created an environment of radical openness, threat and possibility. It can make us feel untethered and scared, and more apt to cling onto the vestiges of the old even as new paradigms are emerging, to aspire to turn back the clock and even to blow everything up and start anew.
My response to all this uncertainty is to look for sources of hope, to find in uncertainty itself reasons for hope. Rebecca Solnit writes that “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”
Happily, once you look for the places where hope lives, you will find it in ample supply. As part of the research I conducted for my report for Democracy Funders Network, Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy, I talked to dozens of visionaries who were imagining and creating new and better ways of being with one another, with nature, with technology and with the planet. The final section of that paper, titled Inspiration, is my compilation of examples of what better futures could look like in real life and in the imagination. Whenever I feel the pull of pessimism, apathy or despair, I turn back to those examples for sustenance. I’ve since compiled yet another set of bright spots in an appealing visual format for a recent gathering of futurists and democracy thought leaders and activists.
Remarkably, the challenge for me now is keeping up with all the examples of good work charting the path to better futures. Since I began an intentional practice of recording bright spots two years ago, I’ve developed a network of doers, thinkers, aggregators, innovators and creators that I didn’t even know existed when I started my research. I’ve found this to be an extremely effective way to counter the corrosive, soul crushing, aperture-narrowing impact of the dystopian media environment we inhabit, an environment which drowns out the positive, elevates conflict, heightens difference, neglects solutions and flattens complexity. It’s a real effort not to get sucked into the vortex of negativity.
So, as promised, here are 24 reasons for hope to get your year off to a good start and inspire you.
Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites
Intergenerational Fairness Frameworks
Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Network
Wales’ Wellbeing of Future Generations Act of 2015
Please share any bright spots you’d like me to know about and, collectively, let’s make the most of the possibilities that lie ahead!
