What is The Big Hope Project?

The last year took a lot out of people we love. If your work touches democracy, human rights, journalism, civil rights, humanitarian response, public health, disaster relief (and many other things I use to think were generally understood to be good for the world) you already know the shape of it: funding that looked stable vanished, programs got cancelled mid-stream, and a lot of people lost jobs that were also, for them, a whole sense of who they were. We did not see it coming, or at least not this fast, which is a humbling thing to admit for a field that spends so much of its time forecasting everyone else's crises.

So, what do you do when the institutions you counted on are busy defending themselves, the money is drying up, and the mood in the room lands somewhere between grief and low-grade panic?

Our answer, for now, is just a few small steps, starter convos, and new communities. We're calling it the Big Hope Project.

We’re building a few learning communities that meet every month, mostly people in a room or on a call working things out together. One connects with organizers resisting authoritarian governments in their own countries and just is about the practicalities of how they keep going day to day, how do they do this work when it has felt like a sisyphean, when change is incremental and there are so many setbacks, when you have to become very careful and focus on security, when the only thing you might have is your community and a good sense of humor. Another treats emergency preparedness the way people who have actually lived through emergencies treat it, through neighbors and mutual aid rather than stocking up at costco and putting together a go bag. There's a group for parents trying to raise kids who will be able to face everything that is to come. And the Joy and Creativity Collective meets to be creative and make things, often badly and on purpose, on the theory that both community-building and art is a survival skill.

Some of this comes from a feeling about where the good ideas actually are. For decades the democracy field has focused on expertise coming from the ‘global north’, on the premise that the job was to help everyone else become more like us. That premise was shaky to begin with and it is not aging well. The most inventive work we see now is coming from people who are younger, further from the money, confronting real threats, and creative because improvisation was the only option they were ever handed. We would rather learn from them than lecture anyone.

We are also done pretending this work has to be miserable to count as serious. Organizing under pressure burns people out, and the things that keep people in it, the camaraderie and the moments of delight and the feeling of being part of something larger than your inbox, are exactly what gets cut when everyone is frightened and broke. Hope, the way we use the word, is closer to a practice than a mood. You build it with other people, usually on a weeknight, usually while doing something else with your hands. It is not trite and it is not easy.

Which brings us to the word we probably overuse the most: solidarity. We say it constantly. We are much worse at building the conditions that make it real, the relationships and the shared knowledge and the resources that move across communities and borders when there is real need. That does not happen because we posted about it. It happens because somebody saw themselves in someone else’s story.

That's what the Big Hope Project is trying to be. We want to build spaces full of people who refuse to spend this stretch of history quietly waiting it out.

We started small on purpose. But rooms like these have a way of turning into something bigger.

If any of this sounds like you, send us a message or come join us. Our events and sign-up links are here.