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If we lose hope in difficult times, we lose everything. In the past, and even now, we have always held onto hope, and we gather here because together we create hope within ourselves and for those most affected by war and conflict.
Susan Risal, Nagarik Awaz, Nepal
Looking back over the past year, I have a sense that we are standing at a threshold (what in Theory U is the bottom of the U) – where certainties have dissolved but a new clarity hasn’t yet formed. It is a place where despair is entirely understandable, and it has surfaced repeatedly in many conversations that I have been part of with activists, community-based grantmakers and local peacebuilders. After all, the systems that were ‘meant to’ hold us are failing, civic space is shrinking, and it appears that conflict is all around us. Many speak openly about exhaustion and despair. And yet, in the same conversations something else keeps appearing – hope – not as an abstraction, but as a practical and political choice, which frees us from the old assumptions of aid and development and offers new ways of being.
I recognise our work at Bridging Dialogues, which builds on lessons from two decades of trying to shift the system to centre the normative values of justice, peace, solidarity and agency in the field of philanthropy, as part of a larger and growing movement. This was felt most recently at Peace Connect in Nairobi where many of us are letting go of the old and practicing our way into a future that is not yet here.
As Otto Scharmer reminds us, the journey toward the possible begins by leaning into the emerging future, not by holding onto the patterns of the past. This feels true for us, but stepping into the unknown, letting go of what is familiar, is not easy. Many times it has felt like entering a fog, with no clear path except for the hope that something better is taking shape just beyond what we can see. And yet, when we listen to local peacebuilders describe how change actually happens in contexts of protracted conflict, repression, and decades of stasis and festering wounds, we hear again and again that this hope is practical. It provides possibilities from which we can create a new world.
At Bridging Dialogues, we are now listening deeply to the sources of hope and the practical possibilities they reveal. We are still learning, but there are three sources of hope that are already becoming visible as we move, with others, toward what wants to be born.
Peace is where we are.
The first possibility is sustained by the choice to act — to keep shaping the conditions for the society we want, even when it feels nothing is changing. In Nepal, this choice shows up as safe spaces for women who face sexual violence in war. Despite over two decades of state failure to lead transitional justice, the fragility of funding, and the surveillance pressures organisations face, local peacebuilders continue to prioritise this healing work.
It is this action that activist and songwriter Joan Baez reminds us, ‘is the antidote to despair’. This points to the first source of hope that local peacebuilders identify – agency. This calls on us to act even when the path is uncertain. As Palestinian activists at Peace Connect reminded us, ‘not having agency is not a choice.’ For Bridging Dialogues as actors in the ecosystem of support for peacebuilding, tending to this grounded, collective, and self-authored sense of agency is essential. Listening to and centring the most impacted by conflict and injustice will ensure the emerging future is shaped by the courage, experience, and stories of those who are modelling it now rather than by our inherited assumptions.
The second possibility pivots on solidarity. Across our dialogues, we hear that hope comes from other people, from being in community, and from choosing solidarity over fear. In India, facing a hostile state and the disappearance of all external funding, a Dalit organisation turned to the community, often very poor people, inviting them to contribute through what they called the Fearless Dalit Bond. What emerged was not simply money; it was a sense of collective ownership. Young people stepped forward, millions mobilised in awareness programmes, and staff kept going even without salaries. The work continued because people recognised themselves in it. Hope lived in the knowledge that it was the people who owned and sustained their work for a better future.
Activists in the United States recalled similar hope during the Black Lives Matter uprisings — the sense of an ecosystem larger than any one organisation, held together by people repeatedly choosing to show up for each other. As Marija Jakovljević also said of this year’s Serbian protests, ‘people started to join the students and for the first time we have an organising of people across all social groups, all social strata coming together.’ To seize hope is to tend to the spaces where solidarity is nurtured – the movements, collectives, networks that allow relational work to take root – where we learn together, from and about each other, and where, and we choose connection over withdrawal and judgment.
The third and most important source of hope local peacebuilders tell us is compassion. They embrace compassion as the antidote to despair and authoritarianism. Choosing to act with compassion and dignity in the face of dehumanisation is the most powerful manifestation of practical hope and quiet resistance. If we look, we see examples everywhere. In Northern Ireland, local peacebuilders engage with armed groups and local authorities to hold conversations to end violence; in Nepal, survivors support survivors through trauma; and in Serbia and Kosovo, women create spaces to speak and listen across political and historical divides. In each story, compassion becomes a way of holding onto humanity when systems refuse to do so.
In this moment of disruption, we should not allow despair to weaken our resolve. Rather, we need to seize hope and in doing so, realise our agency to shape the future, recognise the power of connection, and retain our compassion and humanity. As Masha Chertok reminded me ‘our country might be at war, but if we look around, we see people living with values of peace in their communities, however they can. Peace is where we are.’ It is these possibilities that will shape a collective clarity for our new world.
Hope is not wishful thinking, it is power. It is a way of orienting ourselves towards the future we long for, and towards the people who are already building it. It calls on philanthropy and all of us who have lived through the old system to walk this path alongside them — learning, listening, and showing up in ways that enable this hope to flourish – for the benefit of us all.
Chandrika Sahai is the Director of Bridging Dialogues, an international initiative dedicated to strengthening the ecosystem of support for community-based peacebuilding.
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