Give me one reason to be optimistic!
This blog is an edited version of Mike Allen’s contribution to an EPOCH Practice Webinar “Three Reasons to be Optimistic about Homelessness” on 9th March 2026. Mike Allen’s 10 minute contribution can be viewed here and the full webinar from the start with the two other speakers can be viewed here.
Looking at the positive
When I was first asked to contribute to this webinar, I thought the difficulty would lie in deciding which one of the positive things that I see around me to talk about.
Would I talk about the incredible people I work with in Focus Ireland and across the sector, particularly those who work at the front-line every day? I could tell one story about an intervention that transformed a life, perhaps the life of an entire family. We have dozens of those, as – with our partners in local government – we support more than 3 households out of homelessness every day.
Or perhaps something more systemic: the fact that our government’s new housing and homelessness strategies includes several key ideas that we have been campaigning for years? An action plan on Child and Family Homelessness, a Prevention Framework drawing on the most developed scholarship?
But there is a problem with being asked to do things too far in advance. You pick holes in what you first thought.
All these are real, positive developments and at one level deeply encouraging. But the more I thought about this approach the more problematic it became to me. The question we were asked was not ‘name one positive thing’ but name one ‘reason for optimism’, or more profoundly, where can we find ‘hope’.
The shadow of rising homelessness
The problem that arises here is that if we are to build our optimism on evidence in the real world, we are required to take into account all the evidence. In particular, we cannot close our eyes to the shadow that falls cross all the positive examples we can put forward, the dark shadow of homelessness rising in virtually every country across Europe, even now in Finland. In Ireland, homelessness has doubled in just over 4 years.
There is something hollow about highlighting the small victories when one child in every 230 is living in emergency homeless accommodation, when almost 2,000 households have been homeless for over 3 years. Every one of us who works to end homelessness knows the importance of those positive stories but also that sense that they are somehow not enough.
I have always found a poem by the German poet Erich Fried to be a strange comfort. It is short.
Return on investment
Gathering hope
From soluble problems
From anything
That has some promise
Saving up
Energies
For
The job in hand
That is how
To accumulate quietly
A reserve
Of unexpended despair
Erich Fried
The poem, of course, does not speak against hope, it does not say that the ‘unexpended despair’ overwhelms hope, but it highlights that, in so many of the struggles we face, it is a mistake to expect the balance of evidence to provide a foundation for our hope. While our policy proposals should be evidence-based, the same criteria are better not applied to the question of hope.
Which is not to say that we should ignore the evidence, Seamus Heaney expressed well the challenge we face: “the need to be true to the negative nature of the evidence and at the same time to show an affirming flame”.
Hope as an act of solidarity
I think we misunderstand hope, or optimism, when we think of it as an emotion, or an emotional state, or just as an emotional state. Emotional states are subject to a whole range of vagaries – how well we slept last night, what we ate, the impact of our personal relationships, the weather. Hope, or more specifically hope for the ending of injustice and the ending of homelessness, is more substantial that than, is required to be more substantial than that.
If we think about hope as an emotional response, surely the first person that we need to ask is the person who experiences homelessness? The mother who cannot comfort her child, the man scared to sleep unsheltered on the street. We can understand that, faced with their realities, hope may well run out. We understand our role, as professionals in responding to this: we provide support, help identify solutions or pathways to solutions, we fight for better policies and a better world.
When considered like that, our own practitioner discussions of hope and the admission of the possibility of despair, come to feel like a luxury, an indulgence. Who am I to give up on homelessness? Who am I to abandon hope when the consequences of that abandonment fall entirely on other people?
I am cautious about this line of thought – it can leave us not just feeling the ebbing of hope but also guilt at its ebbing. Just to be clear, I am not saying you are a bad person – or that I am – because sometimes we feel things are hopeless. But I am trying to pull hope away from being about just the personal and the individual.
The ‘reason for optimism’ that I want to share is a way of thinking about hope, I want to argue that hope is better understood as an action, rather than an emotional state. And specifically, it is an action of solidarity, of purposeful human solidarity. It is not a balanced response to the evidence in front of us, or an emotional reaction to it, but an ethical response to the situation that we see our fellow human beings experience.
We all have heard interviews with those brave people who run into burning buildings or throw themselves into a cold river to save someone else. Frequently they are asked ‘how were you so courageous, were you not scared” and usually the answer is ‘yes of course I was scared but I just did it, or found myself doing it, anyway.’ From this we understand that courage is not the absence of fear, courage is an action carried out despite fear.
As in our case, in confronting homelessness what is required in Gramsci’s words is “hope performed, not hope contemplated”.
He also said: we need to “Look reality in the face without illusion but refuse to let that reality paralyze you — act with determination, because change is possible only if we will it.”
Or as Václav Havel put it “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense – no matter how it turns out”.
Something that makes sense
And it is that ‘certainty that something makes sense’ which is the bedrock of hope among people who work to end homelessness. It makes sense, at the most profoundly human level, that everyone should have a place to live which is secure and affordable. This is what Heaney called our ‘glimpsed alternative’, a world in which everyone has a place which they can call home. We have a certainty that it ‘makes sense’ because we know that a home is one of the things which every human needs to make us truly human. A world in which some people are denied that does not make sense.
I suspect that this way of talking about hope or optimism fits awkwardly with some of the ways which homeless NGOs have come to think and talk about the work we do in recent years. In writing this, even I wondered about words like ‘solidarity’ and ‘struggle’, feeling they are old fashioned words, and have become unfamiliar even to me.
I think that most people working to tackle homelessness recognise the way in which processes such as ‘financialization’ and ‘individualisation’ have shaped and increased homelessness over the last few decades. Through our advocacy work we critique these processes and forces, but we are perhaps less aware of how these ideas have entered the way we think.
Tackling homelessness is not just a matter of asserting individual rights or of putting forward evidence-based policy or solving specific, technical problems. All those things matter, but at its heart our work is a struggle for humanity, for what makes us human or deepens our humanity and fulfills it.
The idea that optimism is a personal emotional state, that you are personally responsible for your own hope, and that hope can be nurtured on a diet comprising only stories of individual redemption, in some way represent a privatisation of hope. It is a way of thinking that is shaped by the very forces against which we are struggling. I want to assert that your sense of hope is not your personal responsibility, we might be better to think of it as part of the social fabric, and we all have a responsibility for maintaining it.
For me, viewing our work as part of an on-going struggle, makes it is easier to cope with the evidence that, at this moment, in most countries, things are not going well, the odds are currently stacked against us. We should not expect material conditions to provide hope. The only way to make progress in that struggle is to believe that it can be won, and that we are capable of winning it. In that sense, optimism becomes a weapon in that struggle, a form of discipline within that struggle, an ‘affirming flame’, and a mechanism by which we will ultimately arrive at our ‘glimpsed alternative’ where everyone has a place they can call home.