William Temple Foundation

On 30th April 2025 the William Temple Foundation gathered at the Inner Temple to establish a search for hope across the public square. The breadth of this search can be found in our initial reflections on the gathering here. There will be many more pieces to come in weeks and months to come. This search was rooted in what our keynote speaker Nicky Burridge characterised as authentic communication, and as our own Matthew Barber-Rowell put it, 5 spaces of radical hope. These spaces allowed us to explore radical hope as: 1) rooted in struggle, 2) an experiment for institutions, 3) found within our shared ecology, 4) cocreated and 5) democratic. Our search began with those gathered being given space to assemble hope, as they saw it, contributing to an installation over the course of the conference.

In a spirit of cocreation, delegates were given the earliest possible opportunity to share their own sense of what hope was or where it might be found.  Our artist in residence and facilitator Francesca Bernardi PhD FRSA invited us to participate as follows: 

“We will participate in a gentle offering of hope in our collective gathering today, sharing our individual sense of hope and meaning making in a way that might be assembled into a community of hope. You might want to doodle, or scratch on the paper, you might with to ‘mark make’ and there are mark making tools for that. Each piece of paper that we use will symbolise an individual contribution. The invitation is also that you might write something about hope, so that your understanding of hope in literal terms emerges. Or you might express hope through image making more abstractly. Those online are also welcome to share their meaning of hope, which will be translated into the room, dispelling the boundary and producing collectiveness across different spaces. This is an opportunity to symbolise meaning making, whether it is in a written form of visually in terms of what hope means. This is a chance to be experimental and co-creative, and what we hear in the room might come together with what has brought you here and might be expressed through what you produce”

Some expressions of hope is presented individually below. Then, a sense of the collective installation is also offered. As part of our search for hope, led by Research Fellow Dr Matthew Barber-Rowell, we will seek to communicate, curate and assemble many more expressions of hope in the weeks and months to come.

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