“I work in hope.” This is not the kind of answer to “So, what do you do?” you’d ever think was possible. But look at the mood or trajectory around every progressive project you ever cared about, and think again. Here are ten ideas for hope-focused jobs.

1. Hope curator. Good news websites and wholesome “timeline cleansers” will only get you so far. An organisation, or a project, can benefit immensely if all positive signals related to their work are systematically collected and convincingly presented. Imagine getting a good 2-3-sentence email message every day, telling you about a good development related to your social care project - or a bigger newsletter each week, showing you the impact you are making with your policies.

2. Hope project manager. Listen, I used to PM for a living, and writing this phrase really felt strange. But it checks out. Hope needs constant work. Constant work means there’s more than one step involved. More than one step means this is a project. What if you had someone whose project was to make sure your organisation does not lose hope - or gets more of it?

3. Hope equity officer. Look around you. Some are hopeful and some aren’t. If that’s in a society, then these spirals keep widening and pushing us further apart. If that’s in a group or an organisation, then you risk becoming a collection of disconnected individuals traveling to different places with different energies. “Spreading hope” becomes a job now. And making sure that hope gets to those who need it most.

4. Hope data analyst. Out of 100 hopeful messages, how many made sure they’ve done the math and shown their work? Out of 100 hateful posts, how many have any sort of credible evidence to back them up? Out of the myriad things you’re collecting and tracking, how many are a credible source of hope? That’s the kind of stuff hope data analyst can do.

5. Hope legacy planner. This can be on a small scale (making sure a photographer’s archive is a source of comfort and pride for her and her family) or something much bigger (working to document decades of good things happening as a result of a library’s presence, and making sure the work continues when the library closes). Docs, backups and archives are un-flashy, un-sexy, un-glamorous. So nobody does / funds them. But there is more hope in persistence than you would ever believe.

6. Hope strategist. Hope is a force. So is hate, so is inertia. You can use hope to fight and win. If that sounds woolly and unconvincing, then that’s because we’ve got too few hope strategists around. It won’t be the only thing to rely on - but it must become a useful piece in any game you want to play with it. You need strategists for that. It was said of Napoleon that he “understood the grammar of gunpowder”; get you someone who understands the grammar of hope.

7. Hope writer. Speaking of grammar - were you ever in awe of websites, magazines or programmes whose every word and sentence seemed to work with all the others? Did you ever come across a project whose presence everywhere - from the smallest help section article to the grandest billboard - seemed to be thought through? That’s no accident. Writers will do this for things like “brand identity”, and to sell you stuff like insurance policies or holiday timeshares. Whoever helped/helps write Obamas’ speeches seems to get this, or did, at one point. Your organisation will need this.

8. Hope doula / hope prospector. I wish I could show you some messages, data points, videos. Those who, right now and in years to come, would speak of hope being “dead” or “buried”. Those who will look for ways to start hoping again. It takes more than a pep talk to get through layers of bad stuff. To bring hope to life, to the surface. It’s a full time job. This, in my head, is the least defined job on the list, but possibly the most necessary.

9. Hope community organiser. Your tribe does X, Y, and Z. So you connect with a local community centre who helps you get skills in A, B, and C. Then you link up with Organisation Blank and College InsertName and that leads to you working on D, E, and F together. Every shop, school, book club, WhatsApp group chat - has something they’re working on and are hopeful about. If you have someone to make sense of this, connect the dots, make introductions - an intrepid extrovert in service of local hope - then by making sure these hopes intersect, they would make the communities stronger.

10. Hope coach. Realize the pain of losing hope and spiralling further away from it. Talk about the joy of building, sharing, and strengthening hope. Discuss the tools you have which will move you from pain to joy. Build in accountability for small but constant steps in that direction. That’s what a hope coach could do. For a life, for a cause, for a community.

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You might at this point be saying, “hang on, you’re just describing things which a good [Insert Job] should be doing anyway. Why would you want to create a separate job just for hope?”

To this I would say that yes, in an ideal world this objection would be valid, but in practice, values and ideals quickly get crowded out by other tasks unless they’re The Only Thing You Care About. That’s why there are so many project managers who just want to “get this one over with”, or community outreach people who are forever chasing funding, or writers whose work always gets infected with the tons of newspeak that was there when they joined.

And I would also say that it’s highly likely that some people’s jobs are already all of the above - but with exclusive focus on darker things. Hate has a style guide. Bigotry never runs out of data points. There’s a literal Project 2025, so you better be sure it won’t be without its project managers. Isn’t it time you locked in?

And finally, I would say that in the past several years, I’ve sat in meetings with many people who were paid for things nobody ever saw or benefitted from. Metaverse projects, now abandoned. Adaptive learning initiatives which never adapted to anything. Sustainable goals which nobody ever met or sustained. Jobs, paychecks, all in service of things nobody cares about any more. And don’t even get me started on “AI”. If there’s money and time to treat that seriously, then there should be some for hope as well.

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(Photo credit: “HOPE” by DieselDemon is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse.)