Global voices on progress: a special project of the Monitor Daily

Welcome to a the Monitor’s Global Voices project, our collaboration with more than 50 news organizations worldwide to promote solutions journalism.

It began on June 16, Impact Journalism Day, when we all published stories from one another that focused on what humanity is doing right and with dignity. On Impact Journalism Day, we produced a special edition of the Monitor Daily with eight stories from our partners around the globe. During the summer, we'll publish eight more, so stay tuned.

In all our Global Voices stories – from Madagascar to Switzerland to Taiwan – you’ll see how the goodness and generosity you see in your own communities are universal.

To be honest, when Sparknews, the group that runs Impact Journalism Day, first reached out to us this spring, we’d never heard of the project before. But it didn’t take long to see how well it aligned with the Monitor’s founding mission “to bless all mankind.”

“Headlines tend to paint a bleak picture of our world: conflict, terrorism, hunger, climate change, social injustice – the list goes on. We are indeed facing complex and seemingly insurmountable challenges,” writes Christian de Boisredon, founder of Sparknews. “Yet the full picture also offers solutions and reasons for hope.”

The thirst for this fuller picture has become so strong that it is apparently breaking the laws of mathematics.

When The New York Times recently started a newsletter called The Week in Good News, it had an open rate of more than 100 percent. That means, not only did almost everyone who received it open it, but they opened it multiple times or shared it with friends.

Quite literally, they couldn’t get enough.

Think of this Impact Journalism Day newsletter as “This World in Good News.” And what I love most about the Monitor is that “good news” is not quarantined to a single day or newsletter, it animates everything we do.

Our “good news” is not a breather from the regular “bad news.” Even in situations as seemingly hopeless as violence in the Middle East or political polarization in the United States or human rights in China, the Monitor is always looking for ways forward, never accepting that the “broken” state is the permanent state.

In this task, the Monitor is privileged to be the only American news organization participating in Impact Journalism Day, and to share with our readers the seeds of constructive, hopeful journalism that are sprouting in every corner of the globe.