Spending several months working on an issue of Positive News magazine, I become very aware of how quickly the news cycle moves on. Sometimes, stories that felt urgent when they’re commissioned can, if they’re not carefully judged, feel less important by the time they reach you readers.

But as I put together this issue, which comes out this week, the opposite kept happening. The longer I spent with the stories that make up our cover feature, the more relevant they seemed. Unlike much of what’s in the mainstream news, they hold their worth no matter what happens next week, next month or even next year.

The people you’ll meet within this issue are playing a much longer game. They’re leading very diverse endeavours: from forests to furniture, clocks to concrete, and sea protection to scientific research. But the thread that connects them is a simple but surprisingly radical idea: that some things are worth doing for people we may never meet.

While some of these initiatives might be significant in scale, they don’t have to be. As journalist and author Caitlin Moran tells us in our interview with her, thinking about the future doesn’t have to mean embarking on some grand, decades-long project. It can mean doing something small and tangible today – planting a garden, picking up litter, changing what we give our attention to. Hope, she argues, isn’t optimism but a decision to act.

That sense of agency runs through this issue in other ways, too. Chris Sylvester went from heroin addiction at the age of 13, through prison and homelessness, to founding a soap company that creates jobs for people in recovery. It’s an incredible story, but also a reminder that sometimes a second chance can become a way of creating chances for others.

We also head to Afghanistan to explore how girls and women are finding ways to keep learning in secret schools. I found it deeply inspiring to read how they’re holding on, with great courage, to possibilities for a future that the Taliban is trying to deny them.

The people you’ll meet within this issue are playing a much longer game. The thread that connects them is the idea that some things are worth doing for people we may never meet

Elsewhere, we look at a different kind of future-building: the dads who are finding friendship and support as they take on more of the work of caring. It’s hard not to warm to the sight of blokes gathered around a mannequin with luminous hair, trying out ponytails and plaits – and discovering that they don’t have to figure it all out alone.

Taken together, these stories remind me that the future isn’t some distant place we’re hurtling towards. It’s being shaped all around us, by people making choices about what to protect, what to nurture and what to pass on.

As artist Liam Young put it recently: “The future doesn’t rush over us like water. It’s an act of creation. It’s something we make, moment to moment, together.”

Cover image: Jonatan Jacobson/NordGen