15 years of loving you + an update from my residency in Australia
Hello from Tarntanya-Adelaide where I am the Maker in Residence with Compassion Revolution. What a delight as I celebrate the 15 year anniversary of LoveYou2, 15 years of loving you outloud, wildly, and publicly experimenting with ways to give and receive love.
For my residency, I am responding to Compassion Revolution's prompt: Reasons to stay hopeful in uncertain times.
I've been delighted to partner with founder Mary Freer, and her team to create three activations for the Compassion Revolution community.
My goal with these experiences has been to bring to life the idea that hope is a learnable skill, and can be a collective practice.
A Masterclass for 30 health and social care leaders to explore hope not as a feeling, but as a skill we can practice and build together.
Rather than waiting on hope to arrive, we went full factory mode where we learned to actively build hope, hope work that is in service of a better future. We explored evidence-based frameworks and tried on new ways of developing hope pathways.
I was thrilled when a leader shared she has signed up thinking it was not possible to be hopeful, yet walked away with frameworks to support her hope work and her team. What stands out the most is the power of building our hope skills together.
While we can practice hope-building as an individual, building hope in community becomes a catalyzing force. Learning from each other, the work of building resilience together.
The Library of All Possible Futures
My conference talk, a combination of performance art and workshop to engage the audience in an experience of hope as a collaboration with the future.
I created a box to be delivered as an interruption on stage, a special delivery from the Official Librarian at the "Library of All Possible Futures." This imaginative framework created a shared space between now and next for us to participate in chapters of imagined futures—where repair replaced punishment and where disconnection was replaced with intimacy.
This work of radical imagination is not an escape, nor is it idealistic. It is hope work, collaboratively creating a new infrastructure, new meaning, new care paths in the face of collapse.
Hope: Lost & Found is now live through November 27th (check the link for public dates and the closing celebration). Hope: Lost & Found is part archive, part installation, part community experiment. I'm collecting hope fragments - pieces of hope that have been lost, found, and those we want to tend to.
I've been in conversation with so many folks (on the beach, in between conference talks, at the market, over dinner) thinking about what we've lost and what helps us stay tethered. I'm delighted to be gathering this community wisdom and be able to share lessons learned the the final Hope: Lost & Found celebration. If you are in Tarntanya-Adelaide, please join us!
Learning about hope has so much in common with learning about love. There is no copy/paste solution. And yet there are inherent truths and there are lessons learned and there are tendrils of possibility from others that may help us with our own journey.
Hope isn't about being optimistic, though it is about believing there can be a better or different future. Hope is so much about noticing.
Noticing the people who show up. The stubborn beauty that persists. The small practices that keep us tethered. The ways we tend each other.
Here's what I'd like to invite you to:
Don't wait for a perfect moment or a formula. This week, notice:
Where is hope being tended in your own life? Not the big wins—the small practices. The person who keeps writing love notes even though the world feels heavy. The friend who shows up on difficult days. The way you keep going, even when it's hard.
Maybe it's as simple as: Collect one hope fragment. A moment. A conversation. A practice. Ask someone you love: What have you lost hope in lately? What's helping you find it? Listen. Write it down if you want. You don't need to fix it or respond—just witness it.
Because that's what I've learned in 15 years of this work: Being human is an always-evolving project. So is staying connected. So is tending hope.
And anytime we can craft and build these invisible skills and connections in community, the better. Better together.