Many youth struggle to determine their role and cope with overwhelming emotions and imaginative dystopias around combatting climate catastrophe and capitalist greed. In this time when many marginalised youth feel assured of immediate and distant threat, it is vital for applied theatre practitioners and educators to nurture critical hope as a means to stymy helplessness. The author offers 'ethnodrama of projectivity' as a pedagogical method that utilises research-based drama as a modality for developing both informed representations of potential futures and strategies that may be implemented to achieve them, rooted in criticality, experiential knowledge of marginalised groups, and hope.