Right now, with war, collapse, climate and cost of living dominating our headlines, the systems we thought we could rely on seem completely unreliable and broken, and the governments we used to hope would sort it out for us aren’t. This can feel worrying and daunting at face value, but in reality, it is also a thrilling opportunity.
And in trying, they’re discovering something extraordinary: hope.
In our attention economy their stories are often sidelined or marginalised as unimportant, and given five minutes on the end of the so-called important news. But what we pay attention to grows. It’s our attention that feeds it. So, is it time to reassess?
There’s Mark Pepper and a group of residents from deprived neighbourhood Lawrence Weston who got sick of being ignored and knocked on 3,000 doors to ask, “What matters to you most?” From that came answers many can relate to: our heating bills, living in a food desert, lack of access to green space.
That wind turbine is part of the inspiration for the government's £1 billion investment into community energy projects across the country. Energy for people, owned by the people.
Another story that affected me deeply was that of Immy Kaur and Civic Square in Birmingham. Their ambitious aim is to build a resilient neighbourhood of the future. They, not our governments, are thinking about what a future that is three degrees warmer actually looks like, and in response are creating a dynamic neighbourhood hub, complete with community power station, microfactories and an ambitious retrofit program that puts the power of helping us into our own hands.
On a neighbourhood level Civic Square is doing the learning and the practical experimentation for us so that, in the model of the NHS, its caring, inclusive neighbourhood can become a template that could spread. So I will ask the question again – what if there were a thousand such neighbourhoods across Britain?
Our power is in seeing ourselves as Citizens
“I think there is a citizen in all of us, right? I think of it almost more like a verb than a noun. What is it to citizen? At the level of any given individual, there is a choice to make; do you succumb to this kind of politics of inevitability that people are basically bad, the world that we live in is horrible, but it's all humanity is capable of? Or do you choose to love humanity? And that's not a trivial thing, I'm not using those words lightly.
“On any given day, it might be easier to switch on the news and doom scroll and have your attention co-opted. It's an active choice to reject that, to go and look someone in the eye and see the best in them and invite them into something with me. It's as simple as that and as huge and difficult as that, but it is world changing.”
Take another story from Northern Ireland, where single mum Lee Robb got sick of the narrative around her broken town of Carrick Fergus. She asked her fellow residents what mattered to them and – like many of us – the answer was that they wanted to see a bustling and thriving local high street, something that had been lost over many years.
“It feels really amazing... to have built something really concrete that you can actually touch. And it gives us a huge amount of credibility… because there's a lot of people... just sitting at desks doing research and writing papers and thinking that they're influencing change... And actually we just need people to build real stuff.”
What unites us is greater than what divides us
All around us we see the language and markers of division, both on the left and the right. All the stories that I have outlined so far focus on our essential needs, housing, food, energy and decision making, all part and parcel of political conversations day in, day out, but interestingly, in these communities, traditional politics is rarely part of the conversation.
A recent survey showed that while only 12 per cent of us still trust politicians, 70 per cent of us trust in each other. That is hugely, manifestly important. If we reject narrow, top-down leadership in favour of working together in our communities, the potential to effect change is not just a nice idea, but a generational opportunity. As Jon Alexander says, “All of us are smarter than any of us.”
Podcast ‘Screw this… let’s try something else’ shows that the mechanisms for creating a new kind of political engagement already exist in the citizens assembly in Paris that runs a 100 million euro budget, Scotland’s Community Wealth building bill, and further afield in Zohran Mamdani’s New York Office of Mass Engagement.
What we pay attention to... grows
Practical demonstrations of hope in action show that the most fundamental way to meet the current moment is to come together, and there is a place for all of us within that, whatever our views. By coalescing around common-sense solutions to our basic needs like food, energy, housing and decision-making, we have the tools to bridge division and make real change that can create a better world.
But as an artist and a storyteller I see my responsibility going one step further. I talk a lot about what art is and what it can be, most recently in my book with co-writer Bette Adriaanse, What Art Does. Anything from a hairstyle to a sweet wrapper can be art, and art and creativity are foundational to our lives and are pivotal in creating real, meaningful change.
What we pay attention to grows, so when we look at the stories we are telling ourselves on the news, and in the slick television dramas we watch about the billionaire class, could spending more time focusing on real people doing incredible things help shift the needle to a better world?
So what can we do?
Notice & Listen
Take a walk in your neighbourhood, visit local shops, parks, or community spaces, and simply ask: what matters to people here? Listen to your neighbours’ concerns, ideas and small frustrations. Often, the first step to change is understanding what already exists and what needs attention.
Connect & Multiply
Change spreads through networks. Invite neighbours to help, partner with local groups, or join existing initiatives like community farms, renewable energy co-ops, or housing projects. Sharing ideas and working together multiplies your impact and makes hope contagious.
Remember: hope isn’t something you wait for – it’s something you create, right where you are.
Explore your local initiatives: Use ANTIDOTE’s AI postcode tool to find positive projects within five miles of your home. Podcast – ANTIDOTE.
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