Hope-Based Communications With Thomas Coombes

Communicating Climate Change

This episode features a conversation with Thomas Coombes, Founder and Director of narrative change organization, Hope-based communications. It was recorded in January 2024.

Hope-based communications is a simple, open-source tool for anyone to use, as well as a community anyone can join. It centres around a pledge to apply five shifts to any and all communications output. Those shifts are fear to hope, problem to solution, against to for, threat to opportunity, and victims to everyday heroes.

It’s a pragmatic approach to winning support for policies and advocacy positions by showing how they’ll actually work, acting on the principle that we should be focused on building the world we want, setting the agenda with our values, our goals, our mission, rather than reacting to our opponent's frames and actions.

Borne of learnings and epiphanies during Thomas’ prior roles at Amnesty International and the European Commission, Hope-based communications offers a simple formula for telling stories of our own that contribute to the long-term changes in ideas, attitudes and behaviours, that we want to bring about.

Amongst other things, Thomas and I discussed the concept of hope as both active and visionary, how flipping our intuitions inside out and focusing on particular aspects of a story over others can strengthen our output, and how our brains work to trip us up at so many points along the way.

Additional links:

Visit the hope-based communications website

Check out Thomas’s TED Talk

Thomas’ article "Hope is Action”

Thomas’s piece "“A New Green Wave of Hope”

Follow Thomas on Substack or LinkedIn

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