Each morning, I go to the Karuna News site and summarize two stories into eight or ten lines. I am one of a crew of people all over the world who do this. Between the people who find and suggest the stories in so many places, and those of us who summarize, our work makes it easier for people to look at the world in an appreciative, grateful way.
I’ve been searching for and sharing the hopeful for almost two decades now, first on a wiki (which no longer exists, sadly) and this blog. I do it because I firmly believe that if people in one part of the world read about something being done by people in another part of the world, they might feel inspired by it. Whatever it is, big or small.
This year, it seems to me that there are a great many more sites now looking for constructive, hopeful stories about our world and its people and sharing them. The idea of Solutions Journalism helped lead the way for media. It changed the idea of what journalism should be – not just showing two sides of an issue but digging down to find the solutions people have developed, and sharing them.
“The Solutions Journalism Network is leading a global shift in journalism, focused on what the news misses most often: how people are trying to solve problems and what we can learn from their successes or failures.”
And that’s significant, because it moves us away from the idea that optimism is just relentlessly cheery news, the kind of thing a newspaper places in its ‘optimism’ section.
If you want to know what real good news looks like, you could have a look at Future Crunch’s year end listing of stories you might not have heard about: 99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2022. They do it every year, and this year, they partnered with the Progress Network to prepare the list.
“Our two media outlets, Future Crunch and The Progress Network, spent the year reporting a very different set of stories, the ones you didn’t see on the evening news or in your social feeds,” they said. “Unlikely as it may seem, 2022 was also a year of uplifting human rights victories, extraordinary conservation wins, big milestones in global health and development, and an unprecedented acceleration in the clean energy transition.”
Their goal is to remind us that “away from the headlines, millions of people from every corner of the planet did their best to solve the problems that could be solved, and stayed open-eyed and open-hearted even in the most difficult of circumstances.”
Reasons to be Cheerful, which also has been bringing us great stories from around the world, turned itself into a membership site this year so it could expand the stories it finds and shares. (But there is no paywall.)
And in the UK, there is Positive News. It shared 25 good news stories from 2022. And in the US, I follow Vicki Robin’s podcast, What Could Possibly Go Right?
There are more and more places to look for the good news that doesn’t so often show up in the news headlines. I’ve only listed a few here. So maybe you could make it a resolution for 2023 to spend some time on some of these sites – and maybe even share them with others. Wishing you all the best for 2023.
Featured image: kazuend/Unsplash