The Hopefulness Research Institute is an independent think tank focused on studying and consulting on hope, intimacy, and happiness in communities and popular culture in Canada and the United States.

Some of our projects include:

• Research: Investigating the power of hope through research, pedagogy, and practice with a focus on tech-enabled knowledge translation of research findings

• Film and television: Working with directors and production studios to promote and establish consent culture in Hollywood. This involves working as an intimacy director and/or intimacy coordinator on and off-site, and/or reviewing and editing screenplays or teleplays pre-production.

For collaborations, questions, and more contact Senior Scientist, Dr. Taq Kaur Bhandal at bhandalt@outlook.com. Our organization is currently based in Halifax and Vancouver, Canada on Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, and Mi’kmaw territories.

Theoretical & Practice Perspectives: We are open to consulting with everyone to bring the lens of hope, play, compassion, and kindness to projects! We are committed to excellence in all forms and regularly engage in internal and consulting projects in service of continued innovation. We pair mixed research methodologies and mixed artistic mediums with ancestral South Asian knowledge to generate emergent data and tech on a range of topics related to hope.