What gives you hope?
Frankly, I don't think of hope as a matter of give and take. I am, somehow intrinsically, a reluctant optimist. Reluctant because it's hard to maintain the optimistic stance if one wants to combine it with a decent sense of realism these days. That's the challenge.

How does change happen?
For me there are two answers to this question: one sort of superficial and the other radical. Superficial change is what physicists call unitary evolution: you give me a set of initial conditions today, and I tell you precisely what happened before and will happen in the future, like a clockwork universe in which nothing is ever new. True change is basically uncontrollable, we can never be sure about its outcome, novelty always comes as a surprise, for instance in acts of genuine creativity. We need a better understanding of such unstable events, both in our environment and in ourselves, including to accept uncertainty and unpredictability as inevitable -- perhaps beneficial even.

Why do you join TNI?
"We won't be able to resolve the significant problems of our times at the same level of awareness we were at when we created them." Attributed to Albert Einstein, this quote asks for a new level of conscious awareness and action when dealing with the crises piling up around (and within) us. An awareness that helps lifting us out of infertile intellectual and emotional straight-jackets and what follows from them. I imagine The New Insitute, with its fresh outlook and the enthusiasm that it radiates, as a perfect place to go for it.