Building Community Resilience for future generations
What is
active hope?
"Active Hope" is something that we practice together. On one hand, it is a way of looking at things; a way of making sense of a very confusing world. One the other hand, it is a process that helps us to find our way forward and play our own small part in the changes we want to see.
​Active Hope turns "hope" into a verb. It's something that we can DO. In a workshop or programme, we learn together how to practice Active Hope. This includes learning new perspectives, approaches, and skillsets. It also involves identifying and taking actions, no matter how small.
"We all need this."
-Roisin, 2023 participant
"A special and rare experience; We formed connection, found purpose and built resilience. It renewed gratitude, allowed hope to rekindle and a new narrative to emerge. The perfect antidote to 'Business As Usual' in a broken world."
-Marie, 2023 participant
Active Hope was born as a response to a world in destruction. It addresses the multiple levels of crises that we face, and helps us look together at what we can do about it. It also helps us face the feelings that can be hard to manage -- overwhelm, frustration, despair, anger, hopelessness, helplessness, numbness, sadness, guilt, or fear -- and turn these into healthy fuel for action.
This process can be applied as a general tonic for a community/group that is tired, overwhelmed and/or burnt out, or it can be specific to a particular issue that a group of people might be working on -- such as climate action, or homelessness, or animal welfare. ​
Introducing Active Hope to your group, community or team can help in many ways:
​
-
Build trust, connection, and stronger relationships.
-
Create shared experience and a strong foundation based in the things you hold dear, and the world you are all working towards together. It reminds you why you care, why you do the work you do, and why any of it matters.
-
Release the pressure valve on all the challenges that you face. Through a unique format, challenges are shared in a way that build understanding, trust, and inspiration. It helps us remember that we are not alone, nor unique, in our frustrations and despairs.
-
Empower and inspire people, both individually and together as a team, to take active steps towards the future they want to see.
-
Make space for creativity, new perspectives on situations, fresh approaches to problem-solving, and bottom-up systems change.
-
Generally, it highlights the importance of people-care. It tends to remind us that we care about each other, that we need each other, and that we want to look after both ourselves and each other. It shows us what we want more of in our lives and in our work.
-
Introduce useful skills and models that can be adopted and/or built on over time.
Active Hope:
The Process
Active Hope can be applied in any situation, and it involves 3 key steps:
​
1. Acknowledge the truth of where we are, including how we feel about it.
​
2. Identify a hoped-for future, in terms of the direction we'd like things to move in or the values we want to see expressed.
​
3. Take active steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.
To do this, we use something called "The Work That Reconnects," (WTR) created by Joanna Macy, and her colleagues over time. The WTR takes us through 4 stages of a spiral (pictured left): Gratitude, Honouring our Pain, Seeing with new eyes, and Going Forth. ​
​
The Book
"Active Hope" is also the title of a book written by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone -- two of the founders of this work. They write:
"Active Hope is about finding, and offering, our best response when facing concerns about our world situation. It offers tools that help us face the mess we’re in, as well as find and play our role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, towards a society and way of being that support the flourishing of life."
Anna Swisher is a trained and experienced facilitator of Active Hope & the Work That Reconnects, and the lead facilitator at Project Mobilise.
She studied with Joanna Macy from 2012, and has worked with organisations and community groups all over Ireland.
​
Click here to see some of the people she has worked with.
​
Click here to get in touch.
