Editor’s Note: Our Good friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Liberato Bautista, made this excellent presentation at a recent HLPF side event on “Communities of Hope: Advancing Human Dignity and Development for Sustainable Futures.” “Levi” as he is known, is of Filipino ancestry and has long served in New York as Assistant General Secretary for United Nations and International Affairs, General Board of Church and Society of The United Methodist Church. He is also immediate past president of the Committee on NGOs. Levi is a familiar figure around the UN and this fine talk is what we have come to expect from him.
Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, friends, partners in civil society and faith communities: Thank you to the organizers for convening this timely parallel event to this year’s High-Level Political Forum, titled “Communities of Hope: Advancing Human Dignity and Development for Sustainable Futures.”
At a time when much of our public discourse seems saturated with anxiety, uncertainty, and division, I am grateful that you have chosen to organize a conversation about hope. Some may even accuse us of being hopeless romantics for injecting hope into an anxious world. I confess that I am happy to join that company. So, allow me to invite you, for the next few minutes, to imagine with me a future in the present tense. That may sound like a contradiction. Yet much of our work in the United Nations, in civil
society, and in communities of faith depends precisely on this capacity.
We live amid the present tensions of our time—war and displacement, widening inequalities, lingering historical injustices, ecological degradation, technological uncertainty, and growing fragmentation. Yet we are called at the same time to orient our vision toward futures that are both visible and viable—futures shaped by human dignity, sustainable development, and shared flourishing.
I am especially drawn to the title of this event and its use of the word futures in the plural. Not future, but futures. That choice matters. Because no individual, no nation, no institution, and no tradition possesses a monopoly on what the future should look like. None has a franchise on hope. The future is not something handed down by the powerful. It is something imagined, negotiated, and built together. The language of hope and the language of futures, therefore, share a common invitation. They call us into a collective exercise of moral imagination about what makes for a more just, peaceable, and sustainable world.
Communities of hope help us hold these realities together. The timing of this event is especially meaningful. In just two days, on July 12, the international community will observe the International Day of Hope. By establishing this observance, the United Nations reminds us that hope is not merely a private sentiment but a force that advances dignity, peace, social stability, and sustainable development. Indeed, the United Nations has described itself as “the product of hope.” Hope, therefore, is not peripheral to the multilateral project. It lies close to its heart. The United Nations emerged from humanity’s determination that war, devastation, and fear should not define the future. Hope is among its animating purposes.
And it is in that spirit that I would like to begin with a lesson I continue to learn from people experiencing forced migration. Part of my work has involved creating platforms for migrants, refugees, displaced persons, and communities uprooted by conflict, persecution, environmental degradation, and economic necessity to speak about their own fears and hopes. One quickly discovers that hope, for people in forced movement, is rarely an abstraction. Hope does not recover the passport left behind. Hope does not reunite a parent with a child separated by war. Hope does not erase trauma. Hope does not instantly provide protection, livelihood, housing, or belonging.
And yet they continue to hope. What amazes me is not simply their resilience. What amazes me is their moral orientation. It is their determination to anchor their breath, their being, and their future to hope even when circumstances seem determined to deny their dignity. One of the lessons forced migration teaches us is that human dignity often survives long before development arrives. People continue to imagine futures for themselves and their children even when the path ahead remains uncertain. They continue to seek community amid displacement, dispersal, and dislocation. For some, the hope is a return. For others, it is the possibility of rebuilding life in countries of transit and destination. Development worthy of the name begins there. It begins with the recognition and protection of human dignity.
Communities of hope emerge wherever people refuse to surrender their dignity to conditions that deny it. That experience has led me to a conviction: Hope cannot merely be the ceiling we seek to reach. Hope must also be the floor from which we begin. Too often, we speak of hope as a distant horizon. But when hope is permanently deferred, its very unreachability can become a source of fear. Hope must be accessible. Hope must be tangible. Hope must be lived.
In the Wesleyan understanding of grace, God’s action is not merely a destination awaiting humanity at the end of the journey. Grace is already at work, preparing the way and opening possibilities where none previously seemed to exist. Hope functions in much the same way. It is not only the horizon that beckons us forward. It is also the ground beneath our feet that enables us to move at all.
Perhaps this is one of the lessons we must learn again regarding sustainable development. The Sustainable Development Goals were never intended to be merely a collection of targets and indicators. They were intended to advance human dignity through development and thereby create the conditions for sustainable futures. This year, as the High-Level Political Forum reviews Sustainable Cities and Communities and Partnerships for the Goals, I am reminded that both are, at their heart, questions of hope.
Communities cannot be sustainable if people are denied dignity, participation, belonging, and opportunity. And partnerships cannot flourish where fear, fragmentation, and exclusion prevail. One reason implementation gaps persist is that we have learned to count the goals while becoming less adept at encountering the people they represent. When goals become detached from lived realities, they risk becoming fossilized. Sustainable development is ultimately about creating conditions in which human dignity can flourish. Yet dignity, while inherent in every human person, does not protect itself. It requires protection through institutions, laws, norms, and regimes of human rights.
Hope, therefore, is not sustained by aspiration alone. It also requires institutions capable of safeguarding dignity and advancing rights. It is precisely because the SDGs are ultimately about people that I have come to believe that we live in a world in deficit of hope and in excess of fear. Fear generated by poverty and inequality. Fear generated by conflict and displacement. Fear generated by lingering historical injustices of slavery, colonialism, and racism. Fear generated by ecological degradation. Fear generated by technological change whose ethical consequences remain uncertain.
Yet fear today is more than an emotion. It is increasingly becoming a governing narrative. But we must not allow the present tensions of our day to determine the future. Hope begins with a refusal to make that concession. Hope is humanity’s insistence that another future remains possible.
This is why I increasingly refer to Agenda 2030 and the Pact for the Future as elements of the United Nations’ agenda of hope. They express not only hope for a better world but also hope for a United Nations transformed and fit for purpose—faithful to its foundational responsibilities to advance human dignity and human rights, promote peace and security, and foster sustainable development for people and planet.
For many years, I have argued that civil society must have access to the United Nations’ premises, promises, and processes. Today, I would add a fourth imperative: Civil society must also have access to the agenda of hope. Because hope belongs not only to governments but to peoples. Yet aspirations do not advance themselves. Norms do not implement themselves. Hope does not
institutionalize itself. Every agenda of hope requires institutions capable of shepherding it. The multilateral infrastructure entrusted with this task—the United Nations—is under strain. Ultimately, humanity’s collective capacity to imagine and pursue a common future is under pressure.
This is why I continue to advocate for a people-centered, ethical, and transformative multilateralism. Ethical multilateralism is not merely cooperation among governments. It is the encounter between the community of nations and the community of peoples. Human beings flourish not in isolation but through mutual responsibility, solidarity, compassion, and participation in the common good. As Minjung theologians in South Korea reminded us, ordinary people are not objects of history but its makers. When people become subjects rather than objects, the horizon of hope becomes clearer, and the space for collaboration widens rather than shrinks.
My friend and colleague, Christian social ethicist Dr. Lester Edwin Ruiz, has challenged us to distinguish between what is fundamentally new and what is fundamentally better. This question is especially important in the age of artificial intelligence. The issue is not whether AI is fundamentally new. It clearly is. The deeper question is whether it fosters fundamentally better relationships. In this regard, I find resonance with Pope Leo XIV’s insistence that: People must come before technology. Human dignity must come before efficiency. Ethics must come before capability.
For many of us who work in and around the United Nations, no passage from sacred scripture has captured the moral imagination of the international community more profoundly than Prophet Isaiah’s vision that nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Yet eighty years later, we must acknowledge that the world has not yet beaten all its swords into plowshares. The answer, however, is not to abandon Isaiah’s vision. The answer is to deepen it. This is where I find Prophet Micah’s injunction indispensable. While Isaiah calls us to transform the implements of war, Micah calls us to transform ourselves: to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly.
Here, I also hear an echo of John Wesley’s first general rule: Do no harm. Between the present tensions of our day and the future we aspire to build lies a profound moral responsibility. Do no harm. Do not compromise the future of generations to come with our own follies. Do not diminish tomorrow through the choices we make today. Do not sacrifice the dignity of others for immediate gain.
In a world marked by conflict, displacement, dispersal, dislocation, ecological degradation, widening inequality, and technological disruption, this remains a profoundly relevant public ethic. The world does not need less imagination. It needs imagination disciplined by justice, tempered by mercy, and guided by humility. Perhaps this is what communities of hope are called to offer in our time: not merely a vision of a future without swords and spears, but the moral capacities to build and sustain it.
Finally, these traditions remind us that the future is not merely something we await, inherit, or discover; it is something we create. As the musical Rent reminds us, the opposite of war isn’t peace. It is creation. War destroys. Creation builds. War wounds. Creation heals. War closes horizons. Creation opens possibilities. Therefore, communities of hope become communities of creation. They participate in the ongoing work of creating a world where human dignity is protected, human rights are respected, communities flourish, and sustainable futures become possible. And because destruction is ultimately aligned with death, creation remains one of humanity’s deepest affirmations of life itself.
In a world in deficit of hope and in excess of fear, communities of hope remind us that hope must be more than a destination. It must become a lived reality. They remind us that human dignity is not a consequence of development but its foundation. They remind us that sustainable futures are built when peoples and nations work together to move our world from fear toward hope, from fragmentation toward solidarity, and from what is merely fundamentally new toward relationships that are fundamentally better.
That, I believe, is the promise and calling of communities of hope: advancing human dignity through development for sustainable futures. Thank you for your indulgence.
Tags: United Nations, dignity, hope, Community
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