Thomas is on a mission to apply brain science to human rights. Coming from a refugee family, he is driven by a desire to make people care about each other through better communication and sharper strategy. 

He believes that we can make compassion common sense if we apply insights from neuroscience, psychology and marketing to our activism. 

Thomas created the hope-based approach while working at Amnesty International. What began as a blog post on Human Rights Day in 2017 has grown into a method, a mindset and a global movement practiced by hundreds of activists all over the world.

Instead of founding an agency, Thomas set out to build a community so that anyone can use hope as a smart strategy for change. Since 2019, he has trained more than 75 hope-based trainers, who have led hundreds, maybe thousands, of workshops with activists in more than 60 countries. You can find out more about the genesis of the hope-based approaches in his Ted Talk and this Guardian interview. The hope-based approach is being used by dozens of organizations, including the United Nations Human Rights Office, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. 

Today, Thomas uses the hope-based approach to help civil society groups shift from reactive campaigning towards strategies based on attitude, behavior and culture change. He has written free guides for messaging and narrative change strategy on human rights, civil society, migration and corporate accountability. You can read some of the strategic ways the approach can transform activism on the hope-based substack. Everything hope-based is shared with the social change movement under a creative commons licence. 

Thomas's work has always been all about training and coaching other people to spread their message. He first started training activists to communicate better at anti-corruption group Transparency International, where he adapted the corporate media training he learned at global PR firm HK Strategies for social change. As a press officer and speechwriter at the European Commission, and later with NGOs, he helped leaders express their vision and values. 

He has been part of campaigns on bribery, financial transparency, migration, abortion, torture, human rights defenders and a range of corporate justice issues like Niger Delta oil spills, coltan mining in DRC, palm plantations in Indonesia, justice for Bhopal and worker rights around the Qatar 2022 World Cup. As Head of Brand at Amnesty International, he led the development of a new "Shared Humanity" brand platform and the implementation of hope-based approaches to human rights storytelling. 

Thomas first discovered how narratives shape colonialism and war when studying history at Trinity College Dublin, and then again in the Human Rights MA he got from the Global Campus for Human Rights.

When he’s not doing “hopey, changey stuff,” Thomas can usually be found running in the forests around Berlin, cooking vegan food, or reading world literature.