Cheers to 2015 — A Look Back at the Year in GOOD

This has been an incredible year.

As a world, we’ve experienced our heartbreaks and epic challenges to be sure. Yet so much has been achieved in 2015. We embraced equality and love over bigotry, opened our homes to refugees, chose hope over terror whenever we could, and decided as an entire planet that we would actually stand up to save our world.

So, as we finish out yet another lap made around the sun together, we wanted to take a moment to reflect back on the amazing work and progress that has been a part of GOOD’s 2015—and to thank you for coming along with us on our journey.

This is the year we reached more people with our web and video content than ever before.*

Every day since we launched GOOD in 2006, we’ve set out to help people understand the world so they can improve it. This year, that mission really came alive. From breaking stories around the impact of Black Lives Matter to getting inside perspectives on the fall of Invisible Children, we helped drive national news headlines. From speaking with truthtellers like Nigerian-American journalist Alexis Okeowo, to exploring how Salma Hayek reinvented Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, we learned from those who found unique ways to drive the world forward. We released a new video series that visualized the data in everything from heartbeats to handguns. And we helped bring the smartest and most playful work of others to bigger audiences—remember the cup of tea that helped us understand what consent really means, or how Photoshop can reveal a global definition of beauty? In short, we worked hard to find the sweet spot of creativity, practicality, and optimism. When we did, we learned that GOOD’s mission can truly resonate around the internet.

*More than 50 million people spent 18,000 days of time with us this year!

This is the year we truly reimagined our print magazine.

When we kicked off 2015, we knew it was time to bring GOOD back to print in a strong way. We set out to develop a product that reflects the role we think a printed magazine can and should still play in our lives today: something that lasts, something that looks amazing, and something makes a real impact on our readers. To do this, we teamed up with awesome design firm NJLA, and last spring, we released the new generation of our “Quarterly Journal for the Global Citizen.”

Over the course of the next three issues, we covered a ton of ground: profiling creative innovators on every continent, retracing the steps of Pope Francis’ upbringing in Buenos Aires, documenting the destruction of the Nepal earthquake with the kids of Kathmandu, and exploring our current moment of opportunity in the transgendered community with Hari Nef and Zackary Drucker, stars of the show Transparent. We even got inside the heads of amazing writers like Roxane Gay and Walter Kirn. And we can’t wait to show you what 2016 has in store. (The next issue is our annual GOOD 100, so make sure to subscribe now to get it.)

This is the year we teamed up with more amazing companies and organizations than ever before, to create and tell stories of real impact in the world.

Whether it was helping lululemon develop a new social impact program to debut this coming year, or evolving the Sports Matter program we'd developed with Dick’s Sporting Goods back in 2014 to fund another 650+ youth sports teams in need through DonorsChoose.org, we took on more than 75 projects and partners this year, working from early stage research to campaign strategy and program design, as well as the creative implementation of brand-building, storytelling, or even the running and activation of fully fledged programs with and for our partners.

And in just the last few weeks, we closed the year on a remarkable note, by helping PayPal launch a live tracker of the hundreds of millions of dollars being donated through their platform over the holiday season. It’s been pretty amazing to see so much kindness visualized.

This is the year we helped connect and organize communities big and small to push the world forward.

For nearly a decade, GOOD has been tapped into a network of activists and changemakers, and we were excited to take that community involvement to the next level through our new app CTZN, which we premiered in private beta earlier this year. Over recent months, we’ve built out CTZN with early adopters ranging from Kiva Fellows to select Teach For America chapters, communities like Perthes and the art collective U.S. Department of Arts and Culture. (The latter used CTZN to power a national day of action with creative happenings taking place in over 100 cities in the course of just one week.)

And while CTZN helped connect and empower these kinds of micro-movements, we rallied all of GOOD’s energy to work with our partners to drive real change, whether by working to end illiteracy through Project Literacy with Pearson, solving the world’s biggest issues through our Local Globalists series with the UN Foundation, or taking that collaboration one step further by creating and galvanizing the #EarthToParis campaign. In association with a host of amazing other partners, from Facebook to the City of Paris to National Geographic, we’re proud to have engaged tens of millions of people around the world (even Jack Black, Morgan Freeman, Lincoln Park, and Lil’ Bub got on board!) to bring a voice of unity and solidarity to the COP21 climate conference in Paris earlier this month… which led to a truly historic agreement.

For all this, and for the hard work and long hours along the way, we’re so proud where we’ve made it in 2015, and excited for what’s to come in the year ahead. To all of you—our readers, our fans and subscribers, our collaborators and partners, our clients and contributors, and our team at GOOD HQ in Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle… Thank you.

And with that,

Cheers to 2015 and onwards to an amazing 2016!