Creative Community Organizing: A Guide for Rabble-Rousers, Activists, & Quiet Lovers of Justice

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Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 15 feb 2010 - 241 pagine
A practical guide to community organizing that gathers the accumulated lessons, strategies, and secrets a veteran activist’s fourty-four years of experience.

This latest work by legendary activist, musician, and author Si Kahn is a different kind of community organizing book. As with other books, including some by Kahn himself, it does describe many of the practical tactics organizers use. But it’s also about community organizing as a way of thinking and a way of life.

For Kahn, it has been a way of life. He has been intimately involved in some of the most important progressive struggles of the past fifty years—the civil rights movement, the Harlan County miners’ strike, the fight against prison privatization, and many more. In this unique and moving book he uses his experiences and those of the people he’s worked with to illuminate critical aspects of organizing not touched upon by more conventional manuals.

The stories Kahn tells are entertaining, funny, sad, and inspiring, but they’re more than that—they’re examples of creative community organizing in action. And like the secular rabbi he calls himself, Kahn lays out the specific lessons each tale is meant to teach—not only strategy and tactics, but advice on how to deal on a personal level with the demands of a difficult but vitally important job. Creative Community Organizing will help established organizers become more innovative and encourage them to question established principles and decide if they still work. Aspiring organizers will discover a whole new way of looking at the world—they’ll gain a sense of empowerment, understand that they can live and work in ways that help make the world more just and humane.

With forewords by Angela Davis and Jim Hightower

“Make room, Howard Zinn! Si Kahn’s Creative Community Organizing deserves a place on the must-read shelf next to A People’s History of the United States. Warm, cheerful, candid, and wise—just like the man himself—Si’s book is more than a how-to for justice seekers, more than a gripping memoir from the front lines of bodacious modern activism. It’s the up-close and creative story of how the “people’s history” gets made.” —Jay Harris, Publisher, Mother Jones

Creative Community Organizing documents Si Kahn’s career of working for justice in ways that are deeply affecting, personally and culturally. Si is truly Democracy’s Troubadour, bringing us not just the songs and stories of democracy and justice but also the practical strategies to deepen our democratic roots.” —Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin
 

Sommario

Foreword by Jim Hightower
Foreword by Angela Davis
Introduction
United the Divided Divide the United
If You Dont Fight You Lose Every Time
Check Your Stereotypes at the Door
Dont Just Study HistoryMake
Recognize Risks
Find the Glue
Learn Your Limits
Expect the Impossible
Know When to Raise the Stakes
Keep the Faith
Pull Your Shift
Creative Community Organizings Top 20
Resources

Lift Every Voice
Strengthen the Story
Start at the Finish Line
Be For Not Just Against
Thanks
Index
About the Author
Copyright

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Informazioni sull'autore (2010)

Si Kahn is executive director of Grassroots Leadership (www.grassrootsleadership.org) and a singer and songwriter with fifteen CDs to his credit.

Informazioni bibliografiche