Global Beacons of Hope

Global Beacons of Hope are places carefully chosen to symbolize the imagination, exploration, and moral behavior needed to move the world toward greater justice and sustainability. 

We believe putting a spotlight on them will help change minds and inspire action. 

This project will show how that can be done, starting with representative places in around 20 countries.  

We aim to inspire people to take action to move the world toward greater justice and sustainability. 

This is a civil society, not-for-profit initiative led by nongovernmental organizations. 

We will select, explain, and publicize places associated with extraordinary people, events, and ideas as Global Beacons of Hope to serve as tangible symbols of the kind of imagination, exploration, and moral behavior needed to move the world toward greater justice and sustainability. 

Global Beacons of Hope are meant to be representative, rather than the “best.” Beacons are not an award, and there is no contest. Although designation of places as Beacons may encourage people to visit them, this is not their main purpose, and some of the places are remote or closed to the public. 

Our main audience is the educated public, especially those who have influence over decisions and opinions at all levels of society. 

We aim to change attitudes and change behavior, not by propagandizing but by drawing out the best in people. 

Stories about real places and what has happened in them are powerful communication tools. Tangible symbols are needed even more these days in a world of “cyber-existence” and “virtual reality.” 

For this purpose, emotion is as important as knowledge. Behavioral scientists tell us that raising awareness of facts, by itself, rarely leads to changing behavior. People often make decisions based less on what they know than what they feel and believe. Our communication strategy will take this into account.

Details to come . . . 

Within the broad goals of justice and sustainability, the project is structured around six themes. Each of the places chosen to be a Global Beacon of Hope will represent one or more of them. Other themes could be added, but we wanted to keep this as simple as possible.  

The first five are about both means and ends. For example, respecting human rights is an imperative in itself, and also makes possible progress in the other four areas. These relationships are an example of the sixth theme, Interconnectedness. 

1. Human rights

2. Tolerance and harmony among peoples

3. Valuing and conserving nature

4. Exploration, including scientific research, invention, navigation, astronomy, and voyages in space

5. The mind, including reason, emotion, imagination, creativity, higher consciousness, and spirituality, among other things

6. Interconnectedness: Everything and everyone is interconnected.  

A strong word is needed to encompass what is required to move the world toward greater justice and sustainability. Dictionary definitions are less important than perceptions and impact. 

"Hope" is such a word. We use a definition based on the one in the Cambridge Dictionary: Noun: A confident feeling about what will happen in the future. Verb: To want something to happen or to be true, and usually have a good reason to think that it might.

Here is a definition based on consensus in the field of positive psychology: “Hope, optimism, futuremindedness, and future orientation represent a cognitive, emotional, and motivational stance toward the future. Thinking about the future, expecting that desired events will occur, acting in ways believed to make them more likely, and feeling confident that these will ensue given appropriate efforts sustain good cheer in the here and now and galvanize goal-directed actions.”  

Usually the first question people ask about this initiative is whether it couldn’t just be added to existing official global designations of heritage sites. Unfortunately this isn’t possible. 

The top tier of heritage designations is the World Heritage List, which now includes over a thousand sites in 167 countries. World Heritage is a highly successful program of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). To be listed, properties must meet certain stringent criteria; decisions are made by a committee composed of representatives of national governments. In order to protect the World Heritage List from “political and nationalistic uses,” the committee discourages nominations concerning “historical events or famous people [that] could be strongly influenced by nationalism or other particularisms.” Since governments can disagree about what constitutes nationalism or a “particularism,” the committee goes out of its way to avoid dealing with such issues. None of the six places described above, for example, is on the World Heritage List. 

This will be explained in more detail in an online paper. The bottom line, however, is that for the purpose of choosing the places we are calling Global Beacons of Hope, a nongovernmental initiative is needed.