With Journey to Hopeful Futures, Helena Kettleborough offers a transformative new approach to reimagining a world which respects and restores the natural systems on which life depends. At a time when the imminent destruction of our planet can feel overwhelming, Helena invites the reader to re-energise, re-think and embark with her on a unique journey of hopeful discovery.

This journey involves self, community, planet and cosmos. Having worked as a community activist and teacher for three decades, Helena specialises in creating new spaces within the home, workplace and academy for spiritual reflection. Here, she shares that knowledge with us in a creative, important handbook aimed at nurturing new paradigms — which respect and restore the natural systems on which life depends — a world of love, equality and social justice within our living planet and sacred cosmos.

Through personal stories, research, life-experience, community and spiritual practice, she offers a unique space within which the reader can question, learn and reflect, signposting to an extensive range of resources. The handbook provides a practical toolkit of creative exercises and personal actions to revive our lives, and the world around us — vital steps towards overcoming the daily challenges we all face and to creating new, hopeful futures.

Helena Kettleborough is a writer, speaker and advocate for social and environmental change. Holding a Master’s in responsible enterprise and a PhD in management, learning and leadership, she has worked extensively for equalities, community development and neighbourhood regeneration.

Currently teaching Responsible Business Practice and Sustainable Development at Manchester Metropolitan University, Helena is active in her local neighbourhood and with faith groups, addressing grief for biodiversity loss and climate change and the need to take action. She is a director of the Association of Sustainability Practitioners and established the Centre for Connected Practice in 2015. She is a founding committee member of her local residents’ association in inner city Manchester. She has published extensively in practice, academic and education journals and books.

Helena draws on her career as a senior manager in Local Authorities delivering community development, learning and neighbourhood regen-eration services across North West England as examples of what communities can achieve together as well as her experience as a mother, neighbour and campaigner.

Helena is currently leading a university/community joint project to plant 470 trees in her neighbourhood, having successfully planted 47. Next stop 4,700!

You can find out more about Helena and her research and learning work at https://c4cp.net and her work in the community on the same website and clicking ‘Creative Rusholme’.

"Hope in a time of increasingly traumatic disruption is an elusive quality, but Kettleborough offers us that emotional support, with impressive realism and total integrity. I much enjoyed this book.”
Jonathon Porritt, Co-Founder Forum for the Future, author and campaigner

"Journey to Hopeful Futures is a guide to once again find humanity’s place in a living earth, to rediscover our relations as members of the earth community, reclaim the sacred and through participation in living processes, regenerate Gaia.”
Vandana Shiva, ecologist, philosopher, physicist and Ecofeminist

"This book is a must read!... Her suggestions for participatory actions will engage the reader with actionable solutions.”
Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, Co-Author Journey of the Universe

"This handbook is a rich and stimulating sourcebook for people seeking to live into and help generate hopeful futures for us all."
Judi Marshall, Professor Emerita in Learning and Leadership, Lancaster University Management School