I’ve been receiving more emails lately from people saying one of my articles made them feel despairing. One asked, “How do you keep going?”

Let’s see: In recent months, I’ve written about government corruption, genocide, toxic waste, police chiefs breaking laws, forced electroshock of our elderly… All right, I get the point.

As I was formulating my response, I realized that this is an important question for all of us. How are we grappling with our society’s converging environmental, social and financial crises? So I decided to probe a few local people whom I’d seen doing a lot of volunteer community activism that I valued. Don’t they ever despair? What pulls them out of it?

Lyne England described one of the worst moments she experiences: “Getting a call from a resident, housed in residential care, crying and saying, ‘Help me! Help me get out of here!’” Read the rest at Focus online.