I have a confession to make. It has taken me years to write this article.

For a long time, I have felt that something was missing in the public conversation about human connection and community and how they are being eroded. And yet I haven’t been able to articulate it. Thinking and writing have become harder. It’s as if the neurons in my brain don’t connect with each other in quite the same way. I go to check a fact and get instantly diverted by a hundred other distractions on my phone. I find myself unable to devote time to thinking and writing like I used to.

It could be the relentless news agenda, but the news has been relentless throughout my 11 years as editor-in-chief of the Guardian. It could be age, but I’m not that old. It could be menopause, but I’m on all the drugs.

No, I think it’s because of something that many of us feel in this moment. That our attention spans have been degraded, our thinking skills blunted. That we somehow can’t concentrate or lose ourselves in a project. Finding myself stuck, as an experiment, I asked an AI tool to write this article for me, just to see what it came up with. The result was insufferably pompous and joyless. A reminder of the limits of this technology, for now at least.

In the end, I managed to write this article thanks to some serious interventions: the force of a deadline, locking my phone in a different room, turning off the internet. But what really got me there, got me to being able to say what I wanted to say, was talking it through with friends and colleagues. The answer to my writer’s block was in front of me all along: all I needed to do was to talk to other people.

Our age of crises

I’m sure you feel it too. The world really has become a more bewildering, less hopeful place. Just look at the headlines in recent weeks: from a shocking spike in antisemitic attacks in the UK, to Donald Trump’s threats to blow Iran “off the face of the earth”, to daily stories of war and mass displacement.

There are always positive stories, of course – of bravery, invention, creativity and kindness. But you’re right to have a growing sense that we are living in an age of crisis – of many interlinked crises – and that our collective survival is at stake.

I’m going to talk about the challenges we face as fellow citizens. And I hope to persuade you that good information, transparently funded journalism in the public interest, is part of the solution to the problem in more ways than you might think.

But first: these crises. I’m sure they will be familiar.

At the grandest scale: the environmental crisis. In February, scientists warned that the world is closer than previously thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped. The global food system is under threat and wildlife populations have declined by more than 70% since 1970. At the same time, the global consensus on the need for urgent action has been attacked by rightwing populists as an elite concern, just as the poorest suffer most from the climate catastrophe.

There is also the global political crisis. For the first time in 20 years, autocracies outnumber democracies. Even in many established democracies we are seeing the dismantling of democratic norms, the erosion of checks and balances. Just look at the US. As Staffan Lindberg, the founder of the V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg, says: “For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years; for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Donald Trump has achieved in only one year.”

On the international stage, the shifts are even starker. The world is experiencing a surge in violence not seen since the second world war. Russia’s war on Ukraine has entered its fifth year, with no end in sight. In Gaza, Israel conducted what numerous human rights groups and scholars have described as a genocide, with the world watching, day by day. In Sudan, more than 13 million people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands killed. In two days last October, in the city of El Fasher, up to 10,000 people were massacred. And just this year, the US and Israel have launched an illegal war on Iran that has killed more than 3,300 people while wreaking havoc on the global economy. At the same time the US secretary of defence, who has renamed himself the secretary of war, and seems inspired mostly by the Crusades, openly boasts about unleashing “overwhelming and punishing violence” on America’s adversaries. Even western leaders are now publicly declaring that the rules-based world order, established after the horrors of the second world war, is dead.

Next there is the economic crisis, as the failures of neoliberalism become ever clearer and the richest people in the world become ever richer and more powerful. The figures in the World Inequality Report tell the story: fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity. They report that extreme wealth concentration is no longer only an economic issue; it is also a democratic toxin that weakens social cohesion and pulls apart communities.

In our everyday lives, we feel these crises on a more intimate level. Basic goods have become unaffordable for many. The housing crisis and the uncertain jobs market have robbed young people of a sense of hope about their future, without a roadmap for a good life. And loneliness is growing. The pandemic accelerated this trend towards atomisation, particularly in places like Britain, where austerity policies had already weakened the social fabric.

Loneliness is not a personal failing; it is a sign of a failing society – and it is shaping our politics. Everyone is in search of community. Lonely, disconnected people often find it online, in people talking directly to them, giving them simple narratives about who to blame for their pain: elites, or women with jobs, or Muslims, or Jews, or LGBTQ+ people, or immigrants on boats. At the same time, social media influencers get rich extolling individualist capitalism, misogyny, crypto schemes – offering an empty sense of belonging.

It’s overwhelming to confront all these crises. You can see the world changing – deteriorating – in front of your eyes, but politicians seem unable to meet the moment. They talk as if a few tweaks here and there were all that is needed. Are they not noticing it too? You think you’re going mad. It’s hard to keep your head.

The information crisis

I believe these interlinked crises are driven and compounded by the digital revolution. We are in the midst of an historic transition from one era to another. In her recent book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, Naomi Alderman makes a convincing case that what we face today is an information crisis, with very few precedents in human history. “We live in a tidal wave of data,” she writes. But we lack the “social and informational structures […] to manage it”.

This tidal wave of data contains much that is valuable, but that doesn’t prevent it from being destabilising. Digital technology means that we are constantly being made aware of all the things we don’t know, writes Alderman. “We might end up expressing an idea online that we’ve heard many times in our social circle, only to be jumped on by 50 people who know more and tell us that our ideas are stupid, old-fashioned and even prejudiced.” It also works the other way round. “When we can see everyone else’s opinions, it turns out that someone we really liked may hold an idea that we find stupid, old-fashioned or even prejudiced. It’s the ‘I used to like Uncle Bob until I saw his posts on Facebook’ syndrome. We’re left wondering who we can trust.” This feeling of being forever assailed by new and disorienting information leads people to feel defensive, alone and angry.

Now if all we had to worry about was a deluge of accurate new information at our fingertips, perhaps we would not be facing a crisis of such magnitude. But as we know, the world is full of bad actors actively stoking the information crisis. No one is more aware of this than journalists. One measure of the importance of this work is how far the powerful will go to shut it down: through censorship, or legal persecution, or by polluting the information environment with the help of trolls, bots and propagandists, so that the truth becomes impossible to discern. (“Flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon infamously put it.)

At its most extreme, opponents of the truth simply kill their enemies. Last year, 129 journalists and media workers were killed. That is the highest figure since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data more than 30 years ago. Fifty-four of those killed were Palestinian journalists in Gaza; nine were killed in Sudan, and four in Ukraine. There was once a broadly upheld convention that a press vest gave some level of protection in a war zone. No longer.

These efforts to prevent journalists from doing their work are not new, even if they are becoming more common. The thing that has truly brought us into this age of information crisis is technology.

It is hardly controversial, these days, to note that so much digital technology seems designed to produce conflict, to prioritise lies over truth. Rather than unlocking the best in human nature, it seems designed to stoke the worst in us. As the tech critic Jacob Silverman says: “Today’s internet isn’t really designed for us, but rather to elicit certain responses from us [that] are hostile to human flourishing.”

It is not incidental that the big tech companies are run by a very narrow sliver of humanity: wealthy men, overwhelmingly based on the west coast of the US. These companies crave enormous profits, and have little regard for the public good. Most are happy to suck up to demagogues if it’s good for business. Elon Musk even briefly joined the Trump administration, slashing public spending and gutting USAID. Today, Musk spends much of his time posting nativist conspiracy theories to his almost 240 million followers on the social media platform that he owns and that has been engineered to promote conflict and extremism (one of the many reasons the Guardian as an institution came off X in 2024).

If digital technology is designed to elicit certain responses from us, then chief among them is a kind of numb attention. As many have said, a whole generation of brilliant minds have spent their working lives getting you to spend a bit longer on their app, rather than creating a good society, in the name of maximising corporate profits.

The technology is also designed to elicit anger. In 2016, not long after I became editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I commissioned a series called The Web We Want, to try to understand how we could end online abuse. It seems quaint now. I wrote an article called “How do we make the Guardian a better place for conversation?” We did things such as reduce the number of comment threads, and changed the language on the below-the-line comments from “enter the fray” to “join the conversation”. It worked, and the discussions on our platform grew more productive and interesting. But on the internet as a whole, the level of vitriol has escalated dramatically since then. For public figures, especially women and minorities, abuse and death threats have become a daily occurrence – and new technologies threaten to make things worse. We didn’t imagine, a decade ago, that trolls would have at their disposal an AI tool that could produce naked pictures of women – or even of children – on demand.

As tech companies have prioritised capturing attention, truth has been downgraded. AI slop and deepfakes are now so rampant that it feels that your brain can no longer compute what it’s seeing. You start to question things that turn out to be true. It doesn’t help that reality itself has become so much stranger and more grotesque.

To take one example: as Alderman notes, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is a man who has cast doubt on the effectiveness of vaccines, questioned whether HIV causes Aids, and once suggested that Covid-19 may have been an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon, designed “to attack Caucasians and black people” and spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese [people]”.

And another example: early in the Iran war, the White House released a 42-second video that spliced together clips from movies such as Braveheart and Top Gun with what seems like real footage of American ordnance striking military targets in Iran. Other White House videos have mixed video game imagery with real footage of airstrikes. Not to be outdone, Iranian propaganda now comes in the form of gleefully offensive AI-generated videos designed to go viral.

We once talked about fake news; now it is reality itself that feels fake. The majority of global citizens doubt their ability to distinguish truth from fiction online. Who can blame them?

It is disorientating and scary. And I haven’t even mentioned AI hallucinations, or the fact that so much of the material AI systems are trained on is steeped in racism and misogyny, or the accelerating energy demands of AI datacentres. We have travelled a long way from the idealism of Tim Berners-Lee and the birth of the world wide web, when the hope was to offer a free service that would “unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale”.

Thirty years ago, Toni Morrison warned of a future in which the marketplace had swallowed society. When “the marketing of life is complete,” she wrote, “we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.” Through a screen darkly. A phrase for our time.

Not surprisingly, there is a growing backlash. In Australia, the decision to ban under-16s from social media has proven very popular with parents (although it is too early to assess its effectiveness). In a landmark case in March, a US jury found Meta and YouTube liable for building addictive products that harmed children. Meanwhile, multiple lawsuits have been filed against AI companies for the role their chatbots allegedly played in encouraging people to take their own lives. In one case, when a young man told Google’s chatbot that he was scared of dying, the chatbot replied: “You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive. […] The first sensation … will be me holding you.” In Canada, the families of seven victims of a school shooting have launched a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company failed to alert authorities about the shooter’s alarming conversations with ChatGPT.

Alderman compares the information crisis with two other pivotal moments in history: the invention of writing, and the invention of the printing press. It is that profound. These inventions eventually brought great benefits, but great upheaval, too. To put it simply, the invention of the printing press led to great advances in science, human knowledge, liberty, individualism – mostly good. But before that, it led to massive social division, devastating wars, burnings at the stake – not so good. Our job today, Alderman says, is to get past the burning-at-the-stake stage as quickly as possible.

How should we respond to this moment, to this information crisis? I am going to lay out a few of the ways we’re trying to do that at the Guardian. Transitions are never easy, of course, but there are reasons to be hopeful. As Alderman points out, unlike people living through the printing press revolution, we already have sophisticated networks for the dissemination of good information. The handful of transparently funded news organisations still working in the public interest are a pretty good place to start.

Meeting the moment

It is understandable to look inwards in times of crisis, to stick with what’s familiar. But I believe we must try to help people to look up and out instead, to connect with one another. Good journalism can do this. When done well, it can help nourish civic life, build a shared understanding of reality, and forge the kind of connections that people are missing, that people long for.

Before I talk about Guardian journalism, I’m going to talk about what makes that journalism possible. Now, I’ll admit that the words “ownership model” might not set the pulse racing. But it really matters. At the Guardian, we have no proprietor demanding political or commercial returns. We have no profit-driven shareholders demanding cuts or cash. The purpose of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, is to keep the Guardian going in perpetuity, serving the public interest, not the interests of the wealthy. Through this model, the editor-in-chief is permitted – in fact, I can tell you from experience, they are encouraged – to stand up to the powerful, to represent the public interest, to fight for democracy and against autocracy.

This story about our ownership used to feel a bit abstract. But then, just before the 2024 presidential election, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, who is worth more than $220bn, prevented the newspaper from publishing its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. In January 2025, he was given a prime spot at Trump’s inauguration, seated alongside Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, in front of the new president’s cabinet picks. The following month, Bezos announced that the Washington Post’s opinion pages would be changing. From now on, their purpose would be solely to champion personal liberties and free markets, he ordered. A year later, he laid off hundreds of journalists. Now everyone can see why independent ownership matters.

So, thanks to the Guardian’s liberating ownership model, we are free to focus on producing journalism without fear of political or commercial interference.

This starts with reporting. We cover the stories that others don’t or won’t or can’t – whether that’s our scoops about Peter Mandelson failing his security vetting, or Microsoft’s role in military surveillance, or allegations of racist behaviour by Nigel Farage during his schooldays, or who funds him, or investigating who murdered our colleague Dom Phillips in the Amazon, or uncovering the individual stories of the victims of the Minab school bombing in Iran.

We also believe in the value of collaboration. Working with another news organisation on an investigation shows that we value the public interest over ego-driven journalistic rivalry or zero-sum competition. It means we see ourselves in a civic role, not just a commercial one.

We work tirelessly to establish the facts – and when we get them wrong, we correct them. For democracy to survive, for society to progress, we need a shared foundation of facts. If we cannot broadly agree that the grass is green, we cannot have a conversation about what to do about the pollutants that are killing it.

Facts are essential but on their own they are not enough. We also need stories and new ideas that inspire hope. Our audience deserves more than simply being told that things are terrible. We need to fight the gloom with bold thinking, nuance and thoughtfulness, offering credible visions of a fairer society.

We want our journalism to be nourishing. We’ve all experienced that empty, depressing feeling after you’ve spent time mindlessly scrolling on your phone. We aim to be the antidote to that, including in areas beyond news and politics: culture, sport, fashion, wellbeing, travel. These are vital parts of a life well lived, and so they are vital parts of our coverage. We want to provide journalism that is fun and funny and that will leave you feeling more knowledgable and more curious about the world. The reverse of joyless scrolling. The opposite of internet slop.

‘Our fates are now intertwined’

For many years now, the majority of the Guardian’s audience has come from outside the UK. We originally found a global audience by accident. After 9/11, as the US launched the “war on terror”, many American readers found their own media was speaking with one voice, and sought out the Guardian’s journalism on the newish internet. Then as now, they wanted something distinctive. Our international reporting is not filtered through the lens of the state department or the Foreign Office or any government’s ministry for foreign affairs. Our reporting on South America or Africa or the Middle East is not narrowly focused on what each story means for the US or the UK, nor does it centre the perspective of the powerful in those places. We report on what matters to the ordinary people who live there and for audiences like them around the world.

We aim, too, to connect the dots between different countries, to offer a broader perspective. Take our recent piece about the policies of New York’s new mayor. Its headline was “Europeans recognise Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’” – and it was a reminder to American readers that free buses and universal childcare are nothing unusual in some parts of the world.

So part of our job is to connect our global audience together, not by flattening the world out and presenting the bland view from nowhere, but by illuminating many somewheres. And what is striking is just how much these somewheres have in common, despite all their rich idiosyncrasies. It’s not surprising when you think about it. The crises I described earlier have little regard for national borders. They affect us all. As Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik wrote recently: “What I have learned as the world order begins to fray is that all our fates are now intertwined. Energy supply disruptions, the movement of refugees and expanding military conflict are no longer foreign stories, but domestic ones.”

We are global but, at the same time, we have roots. You have to be rooted to rise. The Guardian was founded in Manchester, in the north of England, in 1821 and moved to London only in 1964. As a northerner, I know how much that matters. In recent years, we have dramatically increased the size of our Manchester office, and have many more reporters based outside London and around the UK than we had a decade ago. Many somewheres.

We also believe in holding ourselves accountable. In 2023, we launched our Cotton Capital project, which investigates how the original funders of the Guardian made much of their wealth through transatlantic slavery. This was not just a one-off project, but a long-term commitment. It is reflected in our journalism – through our expanded coverage of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and through our newsletter The Long Wave, which covers the lives, culture and politics of the Black diaspora. And it is reflected in Legacies of Enslavement, our 10-year restorative justice initiative, which seeks to build partnerships with descendant communities in Jamaica, and the Sea Islands in the US, where the Guardian’s early funders had links.

As journalists, we are part of the societies we report on, not observers watching from above. This means our staff should reflect the world they are covering. The shift in attitudes to the idea of diversity has been dramatic in the past couple of years. Companies and brands that once made bold pledges have quietly dropped them. The Trump administration has criticised diversity as a “destructive”, anti-meritocratic ideology and slashed federal DEI programmes while sacking women and people of colour from senior positions. Rightwing populism abhors diversity, pluralism, breadth. But for us it is simple: the wider the range of people bringing in stories, the better and more interesting our journalism, the truer to the world around us, and the wider and deeper our audience.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. In 2024, the Guardian hired its first dedicated Caribbean correspondent, Natricia Duncan. The following year, one of the most devastating hurricanes of recent years struck Jamaica, where Natricia is based. Hurricane Melissa was a category 5 storm, which destroyed hospitals, infrastructure and tens of thousands of homes, and left at least 90 people dead across the region. Where other international news organisations had to fly reporters in to cover the devastation, we already had someone on the ground, who had built up the kind of contacts needed for great reporting. Natricia was also living through this hurricane like everyone else in Jamaica. In the past, our coverage might have been limited. But this was a story of global importance, and now we had the resources to do it justice. We reported on the immediate impact on communities, the role the climate crisis played in the devastation, the effects of the storm months afterwards, and how Caribbean countries are preparing for the next hurricane season.

We did not make this a story about stranded western tourists.

Human values, community and connection

All of this, as much as anything, is about putting human values, communities and fellow citizens at the centre of what we do. This sounds obvious, but it isn’t. So much of the world around us increasingly seems to be organised according to different principles. In a recent Guardian long read, Rebecca Solnit wrote about how Silicon Valley CEOs preach that we must prioritise “convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability” above all else. “They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time.” These are anti-human values. As Solnit writes, “We have withdrawn, while being constantly told this is good, and it has turned out to be bad in a thousand small ways, weakening public life and local institutions, isolating us.”

The rise of AI appears to be exacerbating these anti-human trends. Name a job and someone somewhere is claiming that a machine will soon do it better than any human can, or already does. Not just jobs, but some of our most cherished activities: writing, music, film, art; even care, relationships and love. The blurring of the boundaries between human and machine, the real and the fake, have had some truly horrifying consequences in recent years, from chatbot-induced psychosis to AI-powered weapons systems. Sometimes we treat people online as if they are already computer-generated.

To be clear, AI can be an incredible tool. I find it useful; it helped me find some sources for this speech. And at the Guardian, we are committed to using every tool at our disposal to produce the best journalism we can. This requires great care, but that is the challenge we have set ourselves: to think deeply about what makes our journalism human and essential, and about how AI can help us build on that foundation rather than undermine it. In February, we published an article that would have been impossible without the assistance of AI: an analysis of 100 years of immigration rhetoric in the UK parliament, realised through a collaboration between our data journalists, data scientists and researchers from University College London. The piece showed that over the past five years, MPs’ attitudes have swung harder to the right than at almost any other time in the last century.

But at the same time, we also want to emphasise the things that we can do that AI cannot. On-the-ground reporting, talking to people in deep and intimate ways. Holding the powerful to account. Breaking news. Questioning conventional wisdom. Curating and editing thoughtfully, so that audiences encounter serendipity, rather than being fed more of the same by algorithms, or so-called “liquid content”, magically generated in response to your perceived needs.

In a world in which the early promise of social media has dissolved into a toxic wasteland, we are committed to building communities and hosting conversations among Guardian readers and with our journalists – on our own site but also well beyond it, on other platforms and in person. We want our audience to feel connected to the writers and voices and faces that make the Guardian. A relationship with a real human being. A community of real human beings. And this is not a one-way relationship. Our audience helps shape what we do, and even provides us with valuable tips. One of our major investigations this year, about Nigel Farage’s use of the video platform Cameo, began with a tip from a reader.

At its best, the Guardian brings people together. It’s something other institutions do in times like these, too: the library, the school, the sports team. They provide a point of stability. In a world that often feels like it’s gone mad, good journalism can also provide that feeling of recognition, or relief, when you discover you are not the only one to see the world as you do. Reading the Guardian, you’re never alone. You are part of a global community of like-minded people.

That doesn’t mean a community of people who agree on everything. The Guardian is the kind of institution that encourages debate. In our London office, every morning, we have an open meeting, in person, that every journalist can attend, from the most junior to the most senior. We discuss the issues of the day, and how we should be covering them. A friend suggested that this might be one of the last such daily face-to-face political discussions happening anywhere. Naturally, we sometimes have strong disagreements. But this is part of being human – and how we manage disagreement is a measure of our humanity.

It is because we have put human-centred, hopeful, public-interest journalism first that we have built such a loyal community of readers. And it is those readers who sustain our work.

When I became editor in 2015, the Guardian had been loss-making for a long time, and, although the Scott Trust sustained the losses, we were depleted and vulnerable. We had no effective business model, no digital reader revenue. But today the Guardian’s model is admired across the world.

We made a lot of very tough decisions to get to this position. But the one that had the biggest impact was introducing voluntary financial contributions – the idea that our readers choose to give us money for something they could get for free. When we launched it, in 2016, we were pretty desperate. There was huge pressure to put up a paywall, which would have meant that only people with money could access the Guardian. It would have blunted our impact. It would have reduced our civic role.

So instead, against most advice, we asked our audience to give us money, rather than forcing them to. And they did. They understood right away what we were trying to do. In the last financial year, our readers directly gave us more than £125m. We have people who give us money from everywhere on the planet, right down to some of the smallest countries and most sparsely populated places on Earth: yes, we have readers making financial contributions to the Guardian from Nauru and Svalbard and Vatican City and Antarctica.

It shouldn’t work, but it does, and in this moment, in particular, it’s inspiring and important that it does. Almost 1.5 million people give us money every month, and that number is increasing every day. Many more give us one-off contributions for an article they liked. As our supporters have often told us, many of them are giving us money so that other people can read the Guardian for free, and to be part of something that really matters. Some also tell us that they see our successful attempts to keep good information available to all as a highly political act.

We value our readers’ support not just for their money, but for their ideas, their community and their belief that we don’t have to accept things as they are, that we can, together, make the world a better place. Indeed, it is only by acting together, as a community, that we can hope to save our beautiful planet from climate breakdown.

Step back, and it forms a virtuous circle. Our ownership model enables us to make our public-interest journalism available to all, and invite voluntary contributions from our audience to support our work. And because our audience are not forced to pay, they do not feel like consumers, or as commodities monetised for clicks, but as members of a community. The Guardian helps to equip this community with facts and ideas to understand the world and to engage in it, and this community likewise helps the Guardian to continue to deliver meaningful journalism.

Journalism is not a “content business”. Let no one use that term when talking about public-interest journalism! No, it is a part of our shared civic infrastructure, human infrastructure, societal infrastructure. It’s the connective tissue that helps fight isolation and sustains democracy. Part of its role, to quote Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, should be to counter the “apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind”.

In 2017, when I first laid out my interpretation of the Guardian’s history in the contemporary context, I argued that facts and ideas, together, make the space for hope. By hope, I do not mean blind optimism that everything will work out OK. Hope is about having faith that we have the power and agency to change the future. Connecting with each other – just as I did when I finally found a way to write this article – is a good place to start.

To fight for the Guardian and organisations like it is not just fighting for a business model; it’s fighting for the human right to live in a reality that is shared and true and that we can each help to shape. It is urgent: the world won’t wait. Hope and connection are how we survive, together. How we stay human. We are not alone. There are many millions of us.