Hello everyone!
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
Fix The News (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.
The Progress Network (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 Zachary Karabell also writes an excellent substack The Edgy Optimist. 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
Rational Optimist Society (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.
Human Progress (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 Past Imperfect.
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.
The Roots of Progress (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
The Goodness Exchange (run by my friend Lynda Ulrich!)
Cleo Abram (a massively popular content creator who explicitly covers tech optimism)
Amanda Royal (Earth Hope)
Abi Olvera (Positive Sum)
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 is for Optimists Club members only, my personal favorite stories lately of good news from around the world. Join us here if interested!
