I cannot believe there are now over 100 of you. If you haven’t shared your info yet and would like to be displayed on our page, please let me know!

If you missed it, the recording from our last live show is now out.

Kicking off the new month with some fresh good news from around the globe. Here are seven of my favorite stories lately:

1. American fathers aged ~30-45 now spend as much time taking care of their kids as the average American mother in 1985. New research has found that since the pandemic, fathers have been voluntarily trading work hours for more time cooking, cleaning, and raising their kids.

2. There is a massive, underappreciated boom happening in both the number of museums worldwide and their willingness to engage in the return of looted artifacts to formerly colonized states. The world has gone from 22,000 museums in 1975 to over 104,000 today.

3. Colombia’s multidimensional poverty rate has dropped from nearly 30% in 2010 to under 10% today, a measure that captures not just income but access to education, healthcare, and infrastructure.

4. Brazil’s deforestation rate fell by 42% last year, helping forests recover from a record year of loss. Additionally, deforestation in the country’s most threatened biome fell to its lowest level in 40 years.

5. West Africa is making major progress toward a power grid capable of powering the region. A World Bank-financed program has connected 15 West African countries through more than 4,000 kilometers of transmission lines.

6. Scottish sea creatures are doing well, a decade after Scotland banned bottom trawling in a protected coastal area, scientists found protected seabeds supporting twice as many species and three times the marine life of nearby fished zones.

7. Sales of combustion engine cars peaked in 2017

Our friends at also just launched a podcast network. Very cool to see optimistic solutions journalism gaining momentum!

They also shared a particularly interesting study on climate change messaging across 63 countries, showing that while that doom-and-gloom is great for social media shares, it’s bad for actually motivating behavior change. People exposed to catastrophic framing were less likely to act than those who read nothing at all.

Instead, what tended to work better was moral framing that makes people feel capable and part of something bigger, but that kind of message doesn’t go viral (or does it?)

OPTIMIST FEATURE!

In this edition, our featured optimist (selected at random from club members) is…

Anna Wells!

"I support Granite Goodness because Andy is 100%+ the vibe we need right now. I desperately need the good stories and good energy - uplifting the goodness keeps me motivated to keep working for a better world."

Anna is a Program Coordinator at PLAN NH, based in Contoocook, NH.

For those of you who have opted into a mailed-print version (which combines our favorite good news from around New England + the world), you can expect a mailing this week!

If you’d like to receive the mail newsletter but haven’t shared your address with me yet, please fill out this form.

For anyone who had been anticipating a live show on June 10 with NHBSR, know that that is being rescheduled for later in the summer.

We will be doing a very casual show in celebration of Pride month on Tues evening June 30 at Auspicious Brew.

Expect a full New England newsletter soon + an exciting announcement (we’re growing!)

-Andy

Returning to you here with another edition of our Optimists Club newsletter.

We had a great night on Friday at our second live show. Official pictures to come but here are a couple previews!

A bunch of our Optimists Club members joined us there! Thank you to Laura Cleminson, Ryan + Rae Lambert, Brittany Carr, Anna Paddock, Matt Doubleday, Nikki Schultz, Andrea Martin, and Jesse Lore (who also was our generous show sponsor via Green Wave Electric Vehicles)

GOOD NEWS

I am often asked how I can be so optimistic. In this issue, I’ll tell you how.

Granite Goodness is just one among many organizations devoted to telling optimistic stories. There is a wide and growing network devoted to this mission, and they are where I got the idea to bring this concept to New England.

Even in the short time I’ve been doing this (20 months) I have also observed a shift amongst major media outlets. More and more, they are investing resources into optimistic solutions journalism.

I thought it would make for a fun piece to compile all of my favorite sources together. A curation of good news curators!

I also hope this list may serve to show fellow media people that solutions journalism is not just a niche thing, but increasingly seen as a savvy investment by traditional media outlets.

We’ll share some of our favorite good news stories lately at the bottom for Optimists Club members.

MY TOP PICKS

(est. 2014)

Based out of Australia, this team is “the world’s leading solutions journalism newsletter” boasting ~80,000 subscribers across 195 countries. I would agree with that assessment. These people are the true originals, and have been at it for over 10 years. They were formerly known as Future Crunch, and I have a vintage t-shirt to prove it.

When I need to explain people what I’m doing and why, I literally pull up their website, and simply say “I am trying to do this, but for New England.”

Their testimonials page is also a work of art. It’s like they literally just published every nice thing anyone’s ever said about them. The page is enormous and feels so human. My dream is to style my Optimists Club page after it— impractically large and positive.

(TPN, est. 2020)

Headquartered at the New America Foundation, this organization was founded during the pandemic. They are the leading convening organization for optimistic / progress oriented storytelling, and also produce a ton of excellent original content themselves. Their podcast “What Could Go Right” is my personal favorite. Granite Goodness is proud to be an official member of The Progress Network. The rest of their members are far more notable than myself, though I never hear Scott Galloway talk about being in TPN. I wish he did!

Their founder also writes an excellent substack . My favorite thing about Zachary is that in the beginning of every podcast episode, he rephrases the mission statement of TPN (“An idea movement that speaks to a better future in a world dominated by voices that suggest a worse one”) in a completely original way, off the top of his head. It’s wildly impressive.

Our World in Data (est. 2014)

This organization is less on the journalistic side of progress and more on the data side. In fact I would just say that they are the data side. Their website is like a modern library of Alexandria. You can imagine Aristotle weeping if he were able to see this information— accurate data about all the worlds biggest problems, neatly categorized and visualized, free to use for anyone, anywhere, all the time, everywhere, forever.

This website and org are the spiritual grandchild of Hans Rosling’s infamous TED talk, where for the first time in the internet era, a wide audience was optimistically educated about the improving state of the world (imagine how happy I was getting to emcee TEDx Portsmouth last year! One of the top TEDx events in the world!)

My favorite quote, which I often cite as how to reconcile an awareness of suffering with the desire to improve the world, comes from them.

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

They also have a page devoted specifically to optimism.

HONORABLE MENTION

(est. 2024)

These guys are more tech focused, but tell amazing stories nonetheless. The name comes from Matt Ridley’s wonderful book, The Rational Optimist. Their platform has grown wildly fast, and they happen to also be incredibly nice.

(est. 2013)

A project of the Cato Institute, their newsletter Doomslayer is an excellent regular curation of progress stories around the globe. Their podcast and work mostly take a economics-centered point of view, and I find Marian Tupy wonderful to listen to on their podcast. Chelsea Follett, their managing editor, also runs the fantastic substack .

(est. 2022)

The personal substack of Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor at Our World in Data, where she breaks down almost every environmental issue imaginable in an entertaining and data-backed way. She is 33 years old and also the author of the incredible book Not the End of the World.

(est. 2017, becoming a non-profit in 2021)

This organization is devoted to studying and advancing the progress movement, in particular accelerating the careers of progress researchers. I view them as a kind of academic companion to the Progress Network (who, to their great credit, contains almost all of these organizations within their network). They run the world’s premier progress conference, just recently established in 2024. Funny story, I was almost hired to help organize this conference! The team there is great.

Their founder, Jason Crawford, is based in Boston. I hope to get him on the podcast sometime!

TRADITIONAL MEDIA + SOLUTIONS JOURNALISM

Here is a curation of more established media outlets and some of their component solutions journalism work I’ve come across:

Reasonably Optimistic from the Washington Post (est. 2025)

Future Perfect from Vox (est. 2018)

50 States, 50 Fixes from the New York Times (est. 2025)

The Solutionaries from Time Magazine (est. 2025)

An Optimists Guide to the Planet from Bloomberg (est. 2024)

How We Fix This from Spotify (est. 2024)

People Fixing the World from BBC (est. 2016)

There are probably tons more I haven’t even heard of.

OTHER GREAT RESOURCES WORTH SHARING

Reasons to be Cheerful

Blue Sky Podcast

The Goodness Exchange (run by my friend Lynda Ulrich!)

Positive News Magazine

Cleo Abram (a massively popular content creator who explicitly covers tech optimism)

Pessimists Archive

Good Good Good

(Earth Hope)

(Positive Sum)

Warp News

Institute for Progress

There is even a subreddit for optimistic data content, r/optimistsunite, which grew from 0 to more than 350,000 members in two years.

There are many more I could list here. Maybe I’ll edit this post sometime to also include books. But for anyone seeking out where to find more optimistic information and content about people making the world better, this list is a pretty good place to start!

Below here are my top good news stories from around the world lately, for Optimists Club members only!

ANDY’S TOP GLOBAL GOOD NEWS LATELY:

• Oil spills from tankers have fallen by more than 90% since the 1970’s

  • “In the 1970s, oil spills from tankers — container ships transporting oil — were common. Between 70 and 100 spills occurred per year. That’s one or two spills every week. This number has fallen by more than 90% since then.”

• Global terrorism deaths hit their lowest point since 2007

  • “Deaths from terrorism fell by 28 per cent to 5,582, and incidents decreased by 22 per cent to 2,944, marking the lowest figures since 2007.”

• Young people are using social media less

  • “A 2025 Deloitte consumer trends survey of more than 4,000 Brits found that nearly a quarter of all consumers had deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months, rising to nearly a third for Gen Zers. Meanwhile, social media use has steadily declined since time spent on the platforms peaked in 2022, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries by the Financial Times and digital audience insights firm GWI.”

• Share of adults globally who think women in their country are treated with respect increased to 72% from 63% in 2022 (Gallup)

• Smoking rates in the United States near all time low

  • “The cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults fell below 10% for the first time in recorded history in 2024.”

OPTIMIST FEATURE!

This month’s featured optimist (selected at random from club members) is…

Anna Paddock!

“I believe that the trajectory of the universe arcs towards justice. There's no denying that there are a lot of bad things in the world, and we should put energy into fixing those problems. However, we NEED to know what is going right in the world - what solutions humanity is creating - in order to have the desire and will to make the world a better place. Granite Goodness is my dose of hope, that reminds me that there are lots of people who care and are working hard to make this world a better place. Joining the Optimists Club is how I show my appreciation for these much needed stories of genuine progress.”

Anna works at the Chocorua Lake Conservancy here in Tamworth. Two weeks ago, we toured the Stonyfield yogurt factory together in Londonderry, NH thanks to the wonderful people at NH Businesses for Social Responsibility.

Thank you for being an optimist Anna!

That’s it for this edition of the Optimists Club Newsletter. New podcast episode and New England good news dropping shortly. See you soon!

-Andy

HAPPY SUNDAY EVERYONE!

So excited to bring you the very first OPTIMISTS CLUB newsletter.

First, I cannot thank each and every one of you enough. Many of you are friends of mine, colleagues, former coworkers or professors, or just great people— all of whom have gone out of their way to materially support Granite Goodness, or gifted that capacity to someone else special in your life. I hope to make you proud, and maybe even a little more optimistic.

Lots going on in Granite Goodness land but above all I hope to see you all at our next LIVE SHOW on Feb 20, at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth. Use code GRANITE for a discount!

Also save the date— there is going to be a meetup on Tues March 17 at Treeline Outfitters in collaboration with our friends at Give and Gather.

If you haven’t already, please fill out the Optimists Club intake info so I can show you off to the world and send you a print newsletter if you like. Reply to me here with any questions!

Now onto the news.

It’s rough out there. We all see it. The news is always dark by nature, but maybe it’s a bit extra dark lately. It even prompted me to write something this past week if you’re curious.

My vision for this newsletter is less a thorough recitation of global progress (done better by others), and more of an inside window on what personally is giving me the most hope and optimism lately. I read a lot of progress journalism, so I’ll share some of my favorite stories here, along with highlighting some of you great people.

This community is very wonderful and organic, if you have any ideas don’t hesitate to reach out. I am already scheming with some of you ; )

Since this is the very first edition of this newsletter, I thought I’d open by echoing my favorite mantra from the very smart people at Our World in Data, who publish world-class freely accessible research on all the biggest problems. It goes like this:

#1 The world is awful.

#2 The world is better than it used to be (in a lot of ways we can measure).

#3 The world can be better than it is now. Way better.

These three statements are true at the same time— they don’t contradict each other!

We’re constantly surrounded by examples of #1. It dominates our feeds and headlines. What we encounter far less often are stories of #2 and #3.

A core insight of solutions journalism is that when our attention is monopolized by #1, we unintentionally reinforce it.

Similarly, giving more space to #2 and #3 helps create more of #2 and #3.

In a nutshell, that’s what we’re trying to do here at Granite Goodness. So here is a nice dose of #2 and #3 from around the world.

OUR TOP GLOBAL PROGRESS STORIES THIS MONTH

#1: India is electrifying its growing economy at a faster rate than other developing nations before it.

When you compare India today with China at a similar income level in 2012, the contrast is striking: solar already supplies about 9 percent of India’s electricity, coal use per person is less than half of China’s was. This is part of a wider trend of nations decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions.

#2: US life expectancy reaches all-time high

This seems to have largely happened because so many fewer people are dying from opioid overdoses. Our very own Mark Lefebvre helped engineer such a decline here in New Hampshire & Maine.

#3: The Ocean Cleanup Project has increased its impact by more than 100x within the last 7 years

Founder Boyan Slat now estimates they intercept 2-5% of global plastic pollution, “slated” to increase (sorry). So many people told this guy it couldn’t be done. He seems to have proved the doubters wrong. There is still obviously a great conversation to be had about reducing plastic pollution in the first place, but I welcome the existence of the cleanup tech and capacity.

#4. Despite disruptions, 2025 saw astounding progress on the elimination of diseases

This was not a year in which you would expect to see such outcomes, and yet, countries made meaningful global health gains, eliminating several deadly diseases, expanding vaccines, and preventing millions of malaria and measles deaths. The global reduction in deadly diseases is one of those areas where there is massive good news and very little awareness of it in America.

#5: Norway is phasing out “frankenchickens” and moving toward in-ovo sexing

Norway announced it will fully phase out fast-growing “frankenchicken” breeds by 2027, becoming the first country to eliminate these high-welfare-risk birds from its poultry industry, affecting about 70 million chickens a year. As part of the transition, producers will also end the practice of killing day-old male chicks by adopting in-ovo sexing technology, which identifies male embryos before hatching, making this one of the most significant animal-welfare advances ever achieved at national scale.

Animal welfare is one of those huge, truly ugly problems we don’t often hear good news about, so this is a welcome development!

The person who deserves a lot of credit for bringing in-ovo sexing tech to the United States also runs a fantastic substack about applying tech toward animal welfare called . His name is Robert Yaman, I spoke to him once, really nice guy!

There are endless progress stories all the time, but those are my favs from January. Now it’s time for our:

OPTIMIST FEATURE!

This month’s featured optimist (selected at random from club members) is…

Mandy Sliver!

“I joined the optimists club to support voices that lead with hope. In a world where negativity often feels louder and more powerful, the club affirms that optimism is not naïve or weak, but a deliberate choice our communities need more of.”

I actually had the pleasure of meeting Mandy at a Leadership NH event over the summer, and again at Radically Rural in Keene. She is quite the sunny human! You can find Mandy on LinkedIn, or over in Peterborough if you’re local to there.

Thank you for being an optimist Mandy : )

That’s it for this edition of the Optimists Club Newsletter. Hope to catch you all at the live show 2/20. We’ll be back tomorrow with the return of the Good News in New England Newsletter : )

-Andy

It has been QUITE a year here at Granite Goodness.

If you have never taken a look at our timeline page, it’s worth a peek.

Over the past year, Granite Goodness has grown in ways I could not have imagined.

In 2025, Granite Goodness:

Built big momentum

• Had our first ever live show, with 115 attendees!!!

• Co-hosted TEDx Portsmouth (largest TEDx event in all of New England), emceed the Bring Back the Trades 2025 Skills Expo at Gillette Stadium, and emceed the 2025 Manchester International Film Festival

• Shared 500+ stories of progress and problem solving across New England in climate, energy, sustainability, housing, infrastructure, economics, workforce development, science, technology, and the nonprofit sector

• Expanded coverage to all six New England states and joined the Progress Network

Grew our community

• Hosted two guest reunions, joined three panels, held six sustainability networking events, and launched three partnerships

• Tripled our podcast downloads and brought our solutions lens to 6 other podcasts

• Grew the newsletter community by more than 6x to over 3,000 subscribers across Substack and Linkedin

• Fostered an online community of 10,000+ social media followers (10x growth) engaging regularly with stories that counter cynicism and highlight real progress

Earned trust and recognition

• Interviewed half of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation, the Governor of NH, UNH’s President, and many others offering optimistic, expert perspectives on housing, opioids, healthcare costs, trades careers, state economics, local food systems, and other issues important to New England.

• Received three awards including NH Young Person of the Year, a UNH GOLD Award, and Catapult Seacoast’s Ten to Watch.

• Published a piece in NH Business Review and attracted press from The Union Leader and UNH Magazine

It has been a lot of work, and I have loved every moment. Granite Goodness is not something I clock into. I live and breathe it.

From the beginning, I have done this project almost entirely for free, purely out of a desire to manifest a more optimistic view of our corner of the world. Apart from a handful of sponsorships, that has remained true.

Looking ahead, Granite Goodness has reached a point where, thanks to all of you, I get to dream even bigger about the impact it can have.

A new way to support Granite Goodness

When I look at everything Granite Goodness has been able to do with very little money, it is clear how much possibility opens up with even a modest amount of support.

So, in that spirit, and in response to popular demand, effective today we are officially launching a new way to support Granite Goodness: Optimists Club!

Optimists Club supports Granite Goodness and helps sustain our optimistic, local, solutions-focused storytelling.

Membership

$5 per month or $50 annually

Annual memberships are discounted to $35 through the end of 2025

Members receive:

• Mailed print editions of Granite Goodness newsletters
  Members can opt in to receive physical copies by mail, or opt out at any time.

• An exclusive monthly members-only newsletter

  A paywalled edition featuring our personal favorite stories of progress and problem-solving from around the world. All other Granite Goodness content will always remain free.

• Discounted tickets to Granite Goodness LIVE shows and merchandise
  (We had our first live show on 11/20/25, merchandise coming in 2026)

• Recognition and features
  Members may opt into being publicly recognized on the Granite Goodness website and newsletter. Optimists Club members are randomly selected for newsletter features.

If you like Granite Goodness and want to support our work, including:

• Newsletters sharing stories of progress across New England

• Podcast interviews with leaders and optimists from across the region

• LIVE events highlighting local problem solvers

• Regular meetups (more coming in 2026)

• Social media storytelling and collaborations with journalists, nonprofits, universities, and innovators

You can also gift an annual membership to someone else in your life who you think could use a little optimism, currently discounted to $35 through the end of 2025.

We’re building something bigger

From the beginning, part of the mission of Granite Goodness has been to help build a better way to tell stories about the problems we face. To do this, we rely on excellent local journalists across New Hampshire and New England, and we believe a healthy local media ecosystem is essential to an informed sense of optimism.

Optimists Club is designed with that belief built in. 10% of all Optimists Club revenue will be donated to organizations that support local journalism in New Hampshire and New England, including groups like the Granite State News Collaborative.

THANK YOU ALL for being part of this community and for helping me believe that optimism isn’t naive. It’s pragmatic.

Hard, and worth it.

Granite and good.

-Andy