Love & Work treats “give peace a chance” as a design brief.
Humanity faces overlapping crises—democratic erosion, climate disruption, deep inequality, and a widespread loss of meaning. The current trajectory won’t get us where we need to go.
Across the globe, people are designing, building, and testing new ways to work, learn, love, and live. These efforts are small enough to try, real enough to matter, and open enough to evolve. Love & Work maps them so they’re easier to see, learn from, and join.
spring 2026
Growth and change is complex. Here are twelve ideas that frame this catalog.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”— R. Buckminster Fuller
LEARNING, SYSTEMS THINKING
Our task is to participate wisely in a world where collapse and rebirth are unfolding at the same time.
None of us has to do everything, but each of us can do something. In Jewish teaching, Rabbi Tarfon says, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it”—a line often associated with the work of repairing the world (tikkun olam). No one is asked to save everything; each of us is asked to take up our share of the work through whatever mix of creativity, care, and courage is available to us, right where we are.
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culture, story
We need a new story.
For centuries, many of us in the industrial West have lived inside a tale that casts the world as raw material and humans as its managers, consumers, and winners or losers. This old narrative has powered extraordinary innovation, but it has also delivered us to the brink: a heating planet, frayed democracies, mass extinction, and a pervasive sense that life is speeding up and thinning out at the same time. In that light, the question is not just what policies we adopt or which technologies we deploy, but what story we are living in—and whether it can still hold.
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learning, long view
The long game is not a strategy for winning; it is a way of belonging.
Social change unfolds over generations, not election cycles. Margaret Wheatley tells a story about colleagues who once met with the Dalai Lama while feeling deeply discouraged that their work for change seemed to have little impact. They asked whether their efforts would ever make a difference, given how dire things looked. With a smile, he replied: “Oh, don’t worry about that. Your work will bear influence in about 700 years.”
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culture, celebration
Joy and creativity are strategies for liberation.
The future needs our delight as much as our outrage. adrienne maree brown teaches that what we pay attention to grows, and that pleasure can be a strategy for liberation—a way of reclaiming our whole, joyful selves in the face of systems designed to numb, exhaust, and divide us. When joy, kindness, and love are chosen deliberately, the terms of the struggle begin to change. Most of us were taught to think of power as domination, extraction, and control.
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HABITAT, design
Design matters.
Design is often invisible but never neutral; it quietly shapes how we see, feel, and act together. It can make cynicism feel inevitable, or gently suggest that care is a given. The lines of a building, the way a room holds light, the ease or friction in a doorway or a website—all of these choices whisper instructions about what and who matters. When we move through environments that are coherent, gracious, and humane, it becomes easier to imagine that our shared life could be that way too.
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company, patronage
Information wants to be free, and it needs support to make it so.
In 1984, at the first Hackers Conference, Stewart Brand famously said, “Information wants to be free.” What he actually said was a little more nuanced: “Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
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LEARNING, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
We are a lot smarter together.
The smartest person in the room is almost never the person who thinks they are. And in any case, the room itself is usually smarter than any single person in it — if we know how to work it. This is not a flattering metaphor. It is a finding. When groups are given the conditions to think well together — genuine diversity of perspective, real listening, shared stakes, and the freedom to disagree — they reliably outperform even their most gifted individual members.
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LEARNING, FUTURES THINKING
Education belongs at the center of any serious conversation about the future.
We have confused education with the delivery of content. For more than a century, most schools in the industrial world have been organized around a simple transaction: adults hold knowledge; children receive it. The measure of success is how much sticks. The tools are lessons, tests, grades, and credentials—a production line that begins with small children and ends, theoretically, with prepared adults.
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LEARNING, FUTURES THINKING
The living world is not a backdrop. It is a teacher.
We built our civilization on a single, confident assumption: that the natural world is a resource. Not a teacher, not a community, not a relative — a resource. Something to be surveyed, extracted, managed, and, if necessary, replaced. This assumption is so embedded in our institutions, our economics, and our education that most of us have spent our lives inside it without ever having to name it.
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LEARNING, personal development
Personal transformation and emotional health are not personal luxuries. They are critical civic resources.
It's relatively easy to describe the crises of our time in the language of systems: broken institutions, failed markets, collapsing ecologies, eroding democracies. But why are these systems failing? It is elucidating to remember that every human-built system is a pattern of relationships. Decisions are made by people who operate from the emotional capacities they have developed over a lifetime.
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LEARNING, systems thinking
The way we come together is itself a technology — and we can upgrade it.
Picture a meeting you have attended recently about something that genuinely mattered — a community problem, an organizational challenge, a question that required the best thinking of everyone in the room. Chances are it followed a familiar script. An agenda was circulated. A few people spoke most of the time. Someone at the front of the room held a marker.
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ECONOMICS, long view
The purpose of economic life is to sustain people and places, not to sacrifice them to the gains of a few.
Most of us were handed an economy we didn’t design and weren’t asked about. We were taught to navigate it — find work, manage money, build security — but not to question its premises. The premises were presented as facts: people are primarily self-interested; competition drives progress; growth is the measure of health. Yet these are not facts. They are choices. And choices, as it turns out, can be changed.
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"Self interest is of the past.
Common interest is for the future."
— David Attenborough
