Today I actually feel some hope for the world for the first time in a long time: from the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights comes The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth - and it's ... really good.
Is it perfect? No, but the authors stress that it is a living document that continues to be researched, and we all know at this point that letting perfect be the enemy of the good is a sure-fire strategy for nothing to ever change.
It is by necessity complex, because the challenges are complex, but it is clear, and it is coherent, and it presents actual concrete solutions, and concrete steps to achieving them.
It understands structural systems, and intersectionality, and it recognises lived experiences as opposed to think-tank suppositions, and deftly translates them into actionable policy responses.
It is kind, and it has been developed by people who clearly genuinely give a shit.
And, unusually, it is ambitious at a scale commensurate to the problem - it doesn't pick at the edges of one or two of the challenges we're confronted with, it goes at all of them wholesale, in all their tangled interconnectedness, recognising that systems-level change is imperative, and also frames that change as achievable. Which it is.
It is also long, at 139 dense pages, but honestly worth reading in its entirety.
I'm feeling a profound sense of possibility and relief at having an actual articulated thing to be able to point to and say, "oh excellent, let's try doing that".
