I have spent this past week in Melbourne at the Australian Childhood Foundation’s International Child Trauma Conference. It has been a gathering of extraordinary minds and hearts, local and international researchers, clinicians, practitioners, survivors and those with lived experience, each contributing their voice to the symphony of healing.

Again and again, in the keynote addresses, the workshops, and the quiet conversations in hallways, one word rose above all others: hope.

Hope for treatment outcomes.
Hope for collaboration.
Hope for systems that no longer fracture children’s lives but instead hold them with safety, dignity, and compassion.
Hope for a future where children who carry trauma are not defined by it.

At first glance, hope may seem like a soft word, even fragile. In the face of children’s pain, systemic neglect, racism and generational cycles of harm, hope can appear naïve. But this week reminded me, with striking clarity, that hope is anything but fragile. Hope is a radical act of care.

To hope is to resist despair. To stand before suffering and declare that healing is possible. It is to insist on possibilities when systems say, “too hard,” when society says, “too broken,” and when trauma whispers “too late.”

One presenter described hope as “a bridge we build between the child’s pain and the adult’s belief in their recovery.” Another spoke of how hope is not an abstract concept but a neurobiological reality, the brain’s capacity to rewire, reimagine, and relearn safety through relationships that endure. It struck me that hope is not merely inspirational; it is scientific, embodied, and profoundly human.

But hope is also practical. It shows up in collaboration across disciplines, when professionals who once worked in silos now sit at the same table. It appears in the quiet persistence of foster carers who stay when behaviours escalate. It rises in teachers who see potential instead of pathology. It lives in therapists who witness unbearable stories yet refuse to turn away.

This week also reminded me that hope and reconciliation walk hand in hand. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, families, and communities, reconciliation is not a symbolic gesture but a lived necessity, a call to listen deeply, to restore dignity, and to create systems of care that honour culture, Country, and connection. To act with reconciliation is to extend the radical care of hope across generations, to insist that healing must be collective as well as individual.

What became clear to me in Melbourne is that hope is not wishful thinking. It is work. It is care and it is radical because it pushes back against the forces that diminish, exclude, and abandon.

Hope says: every child matters, every story matters, every future is still being written.

As I listened, I kept thinking of the children in out-of-home care, in residential units, in youth detention, in classrooms where trauma walks in every morning. For them, hope is not a luxury. It is survival and it is up to us; caregivers, professionals, systems, communities, to embody that hope with actions as well as words.

Leaving the conference, I am reminded of something one of the international speakers said:

“We do not heal children by fixing them. We heal children by refusing to give up on them.”

That refusal, stubborn, grounded, radical hope, is the act of care our world most desperately needs and perhaps the most radical thing we can do, in these times of cynicism and despair, is to keep believing in children’s capacity to grow, to love, to dream, and to heal because in the end, hope is not a soft word at all.

Hope is a revolution.