Summary
Hope-based communication is an approach to campaigning that puts as much effort into showing the change people want as into describing what they oppose. Thomas Coombes developed it at Amnesty International in 2017, to help human rights groups respond to authoritarian populism, and says it was inspired by the work of Anat Shenker-Osorio. It works through five shifts: fear to hope, problem to solution, against to for, threat to opportunity, victim to human.
Hope is defined as “the belief that tomorrow can be better than today, if we take action”. The problems aren’t dropped: the point, Coombes writes, “is to have balance”.
Rationale
Part 1 allows that a disposition “can be tailored in messages”; Coombes’s shifts are a disciplined way to write them. But dispositions are “held in place by many different aspects of our lives”.