Sometimes someone says something that resonates so powerfully that you want to share it with everyone you know. So it was with the final words of Jack Layton’s farewell letter to Canadians. He said:

“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

I realized that he had summed up what I believe. It is why I do the work I do now, and why I created Hopebuilding wiki almost five years ago. Because I believe that the people who hope, and love, and see possibilities are the ones who create change. And they are doing it all the time, even if we don’t always hear about it, all over the world. Hopebuilding wiki shares their stories.

Here on the Hopebuilding blog, I want to talk about what their stories tell us about how we can ‘do’ peacebuilding, and development, differently. I started this blog some time ago but then wasn’t able to spend much time on it for a while. In a sense, then, this is the “new” Hopebuilding blog. I hope it will inspire conversations on this important topic.