What we learned from Season Three of Hope is Verb
We came in sensing that something had shifted in the world since our last round of conversations, but we couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. As we moved through the interviews, every guest, every story, gave us a new piece of the puzzle. The stakes felt higher and there were times when the line between solution and problem became impossibly thin.
These conversations transported us to the Amazon River, to the backstreets of Johannesburg, the wilds of Argentina, and between the homes of two women: one in Israel and one in Palestine. Our guests opened their doors and shared the hidden stories of repair that are unfolding every day in a world that feels more and more broken.
Here’s what we learned.
There are always headwinds
Our first guest was legendary conservationist Kris Tompkins, who alongside her late husband Doug, has protected over 14 million acres of land across Argentina and Chile and reintroduced over two dozen keystone species. As a tenacious peace broker between people and nature, we were curious to hear her thoughts on the state of the planet.
There is a collapse taking place, and it would be happening with rapid velocity if it weren’t for the millions of people around the world who are working to slow down these trends; and they’re doing so in the force of great headwinds.
Kris is no stranger to headwinds. When she and Doug started their rewilding mission in the early 1990s, they encountered fierce opposition from local communities, governments and even the Catholic Church. But together, they kept going and after Doug died in kayaking accident, Kris navigated the headwinds of grief by empowering those around her to future-proof the work.
We’ve long understood that progress is rarely a straight line, but many of our guests reframed it as a radical act. Showing up to mend the damage often involves skirting the edges, challenging the status quo and carving new paths outside the mainstream. To join the resistance isn’t about opposition for its own sake; it’s a catalyst for possibility.
One question we asked our guests more frequently this season was how they kept going when the odds continued to stack against them.
For Colombian biologist Fernando Trujillio, it’s about staying close to the water. During his 30 year crusade to save the endangered river dolphins of the Amazon he’s covered more than 80,000 kilometres of waterways and worked with local communities to create real change. And when historic droughts wiped out hundreds of grey and pink dolphins in a single day last year, he didn’t see it as the end of his mission. Instead, he faced the reality of climate change by getting back on his boat to continue the work.
That’s the thing about headwinds; they’re unpredictable and can sweep in from any direction.
Sonia Vallabha’s headwinds are inside her body. When she was diagnosed with prion disease, a rare and fatal genetic illness called for which there is no viable treatment, she retrained as a scientist to find one. Her journey is the ultimate race against time and although she’s found a way to shut off enough genetic signals to halt the disease, a discovery that could save hundreds of thousands of lives, there are no guarantees that it will happen fast enough to save her own. It’s a jeopardy that she carries into the lab every day and one which she meets not just with science, but poetry.
The more I understand how difficult this is, the more I have this feeling of how miraculous it is that anything ever works at all.
This work is not for the faint-hearted. And what’s extraordinary is that even though every conversation raised the stakes, we never walked away from an interview feeling weighed down. It was the opposite. These people have an ability to hold the problem and the possibility in equal measure, without any assurance that their efforts will pay off; and yet they do it anyway.
Perhaps there is no greater example of this, than a group of mothers fighting for peace against the headwinds of war.
For all that has been written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we tracked down a remarkable story that was missing from the headlines; a partnership between two women-led grassroots organisations, forged across enemy lines, who are fighting for shared vision of peace for their families.
We recorded our conversation with Peta from Women Wage Peace in Jerusalem, and Marwa from Women of the Sun in Bethlehem, on the 300th day of the war. The internet was unstable, but their message was clear - finding common ground is never easy, but you can’t leave the table until you do.
These women-led organisations spent almost a year working through the layers of their intergenerational conflict before launching their shared commitment to end the bloodshed with The Mother’s Call in 2022. Their historic partnership is a blueprint for peace, and our conversation with them left us with a small but very real glimmer of hope for a place that is shrouded in so much darkness right now.
'The world doesn’t stay saved'
Another defining moment this season was this simple phrase from historian and sci-fi author Ada Palmer. In less than an hour, this conversation flipped our view of history and showed us how zooming out to look at progress on a century scale creates more space for hope.
The world doesn’t stay saved. The story of the last 150 years is that we saved the world a couple of times and now we have to save it again. It’s going to be hard; it was every time, but we did it and we will do it again.
Although initially it felt like a bombshell, Ada’s idea that saving the world is not a one-time job came as an unexpected relief. If collapse is inevitable, then repair is part of our contract as human beings. And if we accept that we all have this evolutionary muscle to show up, it empowers us to save the world in our own unique way, in whatever capacity we have.
For conductor and musician Ron Davis Alvarez, this meant responding to the refugee crisis by picking up his violin. After watching crowds of young refugees pour into the central train station in Stockholm in 2016, he created the Dream Orchestra as a space for refugees and migrants to find their voice in a foreign country through the common language of music.
In the Cook Islands, Valery Wichman, a transgender activist, had just finished her law degree when she started a 15 year campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in her country, that resulted in a landmark victory in 2023.
Psychologist and narrative therapist Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo realised her dream of creating greater access to mental health services in South Africa, by putting her clinic on wheels and driving her ‘caravan of joy and tears’ through the townships of Johannesburg to support some of the country’s most disadvantaged and traumatised communities.
So often we hear that one person can’t make a difference, but our guests were testament to the power of one individual to rally other people around an idea, and that’s what changes the world. They may be part of the resistance, but our menders rarely work alone.
This season we also ventured out to explore the wider ecosystem of progress. We were on the ground at the Clinton Global Initiative and felt the energy of a room filled with a thousand change-makers. We learned about solutions to problems that we didn’t know existed and it felt like wherever we put the microphone, there was a story about mending that we hadn’t heard. It was the first time on this podcast where we met people face- to-face - and there was something about this spontaneous interaction that felt very different.
We chatted with Sigrid van Aken, CEO of the Postcode Lottery Group, which we dubbed “one of the world's greatest philanthropy stories you probably haven’t heard about.”
If there is one invisible thread that we’ve picked up on after almost 30 interviews, it’s the ongoing struggle to keep the work funded. So, when we discovered that this Netherlands-based organisation had supported some of the environmental and social initiatives that we’ve been tracking for years, we were curious to understand the different pieces that need to come together to make progress happen.
What surprised us most was their model of trust-based philanthropy, which gives recipients the freedom to choose how they use the funds. Not only does this allow charities to pivot and respond to changing needs, but it also shifts the power dynamic between funder and mender to one of partnership. Perhaps this is the future of philanthropy we've been searching for? Where impact is measured not just in dollars granted, but in the strength of bonds forged and the wisdom of trusting those doing the work.
More than anything, this season was a reminder that progress is driven by people. As Steven Pinker, arguably the world’s best thinker and writer on the topic, explained:
When progress happens it isn’t just a rising tide, it’s not a background force, it’s because someone somewhere decided that we have problems that are fixable so let’s try to fix them.
Our conversation with him was one that we’d been wanting to have for a while, and it didn’t disappoint. Steven’s data-driven perspective came at just the right time, on the eve of the American election, when narratives of decline were rampant. It’s an episode that we’ll go back to and continue unpacking, but one thing that really stayed with us was his definition of hope: “A desire for some future event that has a reasonable chance of happening.”
Rational hope is at the heart of everything we do. The reason we track global progress and have intimate conversations like these is because we’ve learned that hope requires both roots and wings. The more evidence we find of the outcomes that we’re reaching for; the stronger hope becomes and the more likely we are to keep putting one foot in front of the other when those headwinds pick up speed.
The power of names
At the end of every conversation, after the guest clicked out of the screen, there was always a moment where we’d take off our headphones, lean back in our chairs and sit for a few breaths until one of us would break the silence with some variation of:
Wow, humans are amazing.
We need these stories.
A big part of our mission has always been to counter celebrity culture by shining a light on the unknown heroes who fly under the radar. But with everything that’s happened in the world over these past four months, knowing the names of these people has sustained our faith when the global skies have turned dark and stormy.
The power of a name is that it gives you something tangible to hold onto. Regardless of who wins an election or the inevitable setbacks and downswings; Naczelo will keep driving her van, Fernando will wake up each morning to get on his boat, the Dream Orchestra will make music, and Sonia will keep showing up to the lab.
At a time when it’s easy to slide into despair and to feel like we have lost control of the tailspin, these people remind us that there is always something we can do. And the list of their names grows longer each season.
I worked in mainstream media for 15 years before coming into this work, so for most of my career these stories were rarely in view. But once I started looking for them, I realised they are everywhere. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when they became my new normal, but I can tell you that holding these stories has changed me profoundly; the way I look at the world is different, the way I show up for the world is different.
And for my 11 year old son, who struggled to do anything quietly in the hallway during our recordings, I love that these people are now part of his orbit alongside YouTube sensations and football stars.
This season changed our relationship with hope. If mending can be a radical act, we realised that hope is a street fighter. The tougher the environment, the harder the obstacles; the more resilient it becomes. Hope is not some invisible force that sweeps in to save the day. It’s gritty and battered. It builds in increments and gains groundswell from tiny but cumulative efforts of ordinary people from every corner of the globe.
It’s what Kris Tompkins called the power of small streets and Jane Goodall referred to as millions of little bits.
More than anyone on the planet, Jane is the perfect avatar for our work. When we spoke with her in New York, we walked away with a very clear and pragmatic assignment: meet the world exactly where it is, always believe that we can do better and do whatever you can to make that happen.
I see humanity at the mouth of a long dark tunnel and there’s a little star at the end that’s hope. But there’s no good sitting at the mouth of the tunnel and just waiting for the star to come; you’ve got to crawl under, climb over, work around all the obstacles between us and that star.