Can hope inspire change in a world dominated by crises and uncertainty?
Thomas Coombes is not the kind of person you might expect to dedicate his professional life to hope.
»Before I started working with hope, I did not think of myself as particularly hopeful. I can actually be quite negative and pessimistic,« he admits.
Yet as the founder of Hope-based Communications, he has spent years helping activists, organisations and movements rethink how they communicate about some of the world's most difficult challenges.
His starting point is a simple but important distinction: hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is about expecting things to turn out well. Hope, on the other hand, begins with recognising that things are not as they should be. It does not promise a happy ending. It offers a reason to keep trying.
»Hope is a tool for dark times,« he says.
At GRASP Festival 2026, where hope for the future was a central theme, Coombes challenged a familiar assumption: that the most effective way to inspire change is to show people just how bad things have become.
When fear becomes part of the problem
For much of his career, Coombes worked in human rights communication, where exposing injustice and drawing attention to suffering are fundamental parts of the job. But over time, he began questioning whether the constant emphasis on crises, violations and threats was always having the intended effect. He saw how fear was being used to divide people, particularly in political debates about migration and human rights, and began to wonder whether the organisations challenging those narratives were sometimes reinforcing the same emotions.
The problem was not that the crises were exaggerated or unimportant. It was that describing the scale of a problem did not necessarily help people believe they could do anything about it. When people are repeatedly confronted with suffering without being shown a meaningful way forward, fear can turn into helplessness. And helplessness can become disengagement.
For Coombes, this raised a fundamental question: What if communication about social change focused not only on what we need to stop, but also on what we want to create?
That question became the foundation of Hope-based Communications. Coombes noticed how easily activists could describe everything they were fighting against. They had a rich vocabulary for injustice, discrimination and inequality, but describing the alternative was often much harder. What would a more welcoming society actually look like? How would people treat each other differently? What would change in their everyday lives?
»It's about showing how things could be, not just how they are,« Coombes explains.
Rather than abandoning criticism or avoiding difficult truths, the approach encourages organisations to give more attention to the changes they want people to embrace. What began as a simple tool for reframing messages gradually became something more fundamental: helping people articulate the future they wanted to create and communicate it in ways that could inspire others to act.
What happens when we listen instead of persuade?
For Coombes, one of the clearest examples of how communication can inspire social change comes from his native Ireland. Growing up in the 1980s, he experienced a deeply socially conservative country. Divorce was prohibited, contraception was heavily restricted, and same-sex marriage and abortion rights seemed politically distant. Yet within a few decades, Ireland underwent profound social change, culminating in landmark referendums on marriage equality in 2015 and abortion rights in 2018.
Coombes particularly highlights the campaign for marriage equality, where activists embraced a more hopeful approach to communication. Rather than confronting or shaming people who were undecided, campaigners appealed to shared values such as care, compassion and belonging. Through personal stories, including those of parents supporting their LGBTQ+ children, they helped people see themselves as part of a more inclusive society.
One approach that particularly interests Coombes is known as deep canvassing, where campaigners engage people in open conversations, listening to their experiences rather than trying to win an argument. The idea is that people are more likely to reconsider their views when they have the space to reflect on their own values and experiences.
Coombes recalls hearing from people involved the campaigns that they almost missed the process once it was over, because the conversations themselves had created a stronger sense of community and connection. For him, this illustrates something important: hope is not simply a message delivered to an audience. It can also emerge through the way people engage with one another.
But how can that sense of connection be brought into digital spaces, where conflict, fear and outrage often attract the most attention? Coombes recognises that anger, grief and outrage can all be necessary responses to injustice. The challenge comes when those emotions become the only tools available. Constant outrage can be exhausting, while communication built entirely around what is wrong risks leaving little room for people to experience the values a movement wants to promote.
Instead, he argues for a broader emotional vocabulary that also makes room for admiration, generosity, kindness and belonging. And he believes we should question the systems through which we communicate. If today's digital platforms are primarily designed to maximise engagement and profit, what might they look like if they were designed to encourage empathy and human connection instead?
The risk of being called naive
There is, of course, an obvious challenge to this approach. Can focusing on hope make us overlook the seriousness of the problems we face? Does it risk encouraging wishful thinking at a time when the world needs urgent action?
Coombes recognises the importance of that concern. But he argues that hope is fundamentally different from assuming everything will work out. It is not about being certain of success. It is about recognising that change is possible and deciding that pursuing it is worthwhile.
And he sees another risk that receives far less attention.
»The danger is that we never share our hope at all because we're afraid people will say we're naive,« he says.
If movements are so concerned with appearing realistic that they stop describing the future they want, they may also undermine their ability to bring that future about.
Bringing hope to life through art and culture
The role of art and culture in helping people imagine different futures was one of the reasons Coombes was particularly excited to take part in GRASP Festival.
Earlier in his career, he saw cultural work as largely separate from the practical business of human rights campaigning. Media coverage, political pressure and exposing violations seemed more directly connected to achieving change. But his understanding has shifted. If social change depends partly on people's ability to recognise and believe in alternatives, then facts and arguments alone are not enough. People need stories, images and experiences that make different ways of living feel tangible.
Coombes describes how his work on migration has increasingly led him to think about welcoming communities, not only as a political goal, but as something people should be able to experience. A shared dinner table, for example, where established residents and newcomers meet, can make values such as hospitality, solidarity and belonging visible through an everyday encounter.
These moments may seem small, but for Coombes they point towards something much bigger: creating new rituals and practices through which people can experience the kind of society they want to build.
He sees an important opportunity here for closer collaboration between artists and activists. Activists may understand the political changes they want to achieve but lack the creative tools to bring their visions to life. Artists, meanwhile, can create experiences that open up new ways of seeing and relating to the world.
For Coombes, bringing those worlds together is not simply about communicating a vision of change. It is about giving people something they can see, feel and participate in.
»We desperately need more pictures, more stories in the world,« he says.
About Thomas Coombes
Thomas Coombes is a human-rights and communications strategist and the founder of Hope-based Communications. Previously Head of Brand and Deputy Communications Director at Amnesty International, he has also worked with Transparency International and the European Commission. Today, he helps activists and organisations around the world use hope, empathy and storytelling to inspire collective action and social change.
Read more about Hope-based Communications here
