The issue also delves into resilience-building playgrounds, efforts to map the world’s fungal networks, ’slow homeware’ and wooden bicycles. Lucy Purdy, editor-in-chief, says it’s packed with stories of hope in action
The idea of thinking positively – that you can just choose to believe that things are good and then they somehow will be – is at best ineffective and at worst destructive. Pretending that things are fine? It just doesn’t work.
But we can choose to see the full picture, the good and bad in a situation, and to focus on the opportunities for positive change without being blind to the difficulties.
The January-March issue of Positive News magazine is packed with people who have decided to do just that. The five men in our cover story speak compellingly about why it’s time more men actively joined the fight to tackle violence against women. Theirs aren’t empty words: all of them have deeply personal motivations for getting involved.
Hawa Bah, who we also meet this issue, suffered unimaginably as a child when she experienced female genital mutilation in her native Guinea. Not only has she vowed not to let that experience define her, she’s channelled it into helping other FGM survivors in the UK, where she now lives.
Elsewhere, we speak to eco-entrepreneurs who are responding to the worrying pervasiveness of chemicals in our lives by developing cleaner alternatives – for everything from textiles to packaging. And we profile designers who believe that we can have beautiful things in our homes without straining the planet.
We can choose to see the full picture, and to focus on the opportunities for positive change without being blind to the difficulties
All of these stories acknowledge what’s challenging but also capture the great power in choosing to focus our valuable attention on what can be done. That’s empowering. And that’s how our journalism works.
We don’t do superficial happy endings at Positive News, but we do report people’s challenging, beautiful, difficult, and brilliant stories. Because life can be all of those things – and 2022 is sure to send many more challenges, and opportunities, our way.
