The third edition of the manual for community organizers tells readers how to most effectively implement community action for social change, clearly laying out grassroots organizing principles, methods, and best practices. Written for those who want to improve their own lives or the lives of others, this thoroughly revised how-to manual presents techniques groups can use to organize successfully in pursuit of their dreams. The book combines time-tested, universal principles and methods with cutting-edge material addressing new opportunities and challenges. It covers basic concepts and best practices and offers step-by-step guidelines on things an organizer needs to know, such as how to identify issues, formulate strategies, set goals, recruit participants, and much more. The work focuses on six organizing arenas: turf/geography, failth-based, issue, identity, shared experience, and work-related. It offers new or expanded material addressing community development, use of social media, internal organizational dynamics, electoral organizing, evaluation/assessment, and prevention of burnout for key leaders. There are also nuts-and-bolts articles by experts who address topics such as action research, lobbying, legal tactics, and grassroots fundraising. Numerous case examples, charts, worksheets, and small group exercises enrich the discussion and bring the material to life.

The successor to the legendary activist Saul Alinsky, Edward T. Chambers pioneered a set of principles and practices that have guided community organizations throughout the US and the world. Roots for Radicals remains his definitive reflection on these fundamental principles of community activism: how, as public citizens, we can navigate the gap between the world as it is and as it should be, between self-interest and self-sacrifice and in doing so create lasting change for our communities. In the face of the increasingly turbulent politics of the 21st-century, Chambers's book has never been more relevant.

You can control corporate polluters, rebuild your neighborhood, develop good jobs, restructure public welfare, improve schools, or change the treatment that you receive from local police, landlords, or public administrators. Roots to Power shows you how to organize with other people to resolve problems that arise from everyday situations--not just to win one special reform or institutional change at the present time, but to build a long-term, collective power base with a capacity to win battles in the future by tapping economic, electoral, and direct-action sources of power. A definitive reference and handbook that describes community groups and gives detailed examples of how to organize and maintain them.

Through direct engagement with gardeners, activists, and residents, Miranda Martinez shows the breadth and diversity of the community gardening movement and how these groups inserted themselves into local politics and development to create change. She demonstrates how real people are effective as social forces amid large scale urban change and looks at the complexities and contradictions involved in transformations of urban neighborhoods. One of the most important contributions of this study is its focus on the Puerto Ricans of the Lower East Side and their struggle to sustain its Latinidad. It goes deeply into the ethnic and cultural significance at the neighborhood and personal level to show the contradictory meanings of gentrification to Puerto Ricans and others, and more importantly, the ways that the history and culture of Puerto Ricans are ignored, devalued, and erased. By going to the grassroots, this book vividly demonstrates how Puerto Ricans interact with the global and local trends involved in gentrification and how the struggles against displacement can alter the boundaries of the process.

Sheets-Johnstone critically examines the work of contemporary theorists, including Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida, in an effort to recover the lived body and its impact on gendered existence and power relations. Deeply critical of feminist writers who minimize biological experience, she argues that theorists must thoroughly consider the evolutionary body in order to understand its cultural reworkings.. -- Choice review.

Why the future of great power politics is likely to resemble its dismal past Can great powers be confident that their peers have benign intentions? States that trust each other can live at peace; those that mistrust each other are doomed to compete for arms and allies and may even go to war. Sebastian Rosato explains that states routinely lack the kind of information they need to be convinced that their rivals mean them no harm. Even in cases that supposedly involved mutual trust—Germany and Russia in the Bismarck era; Britain and the United States during the great rapprochement; France and Germany, and Japan and the United States in the early interwar period; and the Soviet Union and United States at the end of the Cold War—the protagonists mistrusted each other and struggled for advantage. Rosato argues that the ramifications of his argument for U.S.–China relations are profound: the future of great power politics is likely to resemble its dismal past.

Researching family history is the second most popular topic on the Internet (after sex). In Online Roots, Pamela Boyer Porter, a Certified Genealogical Records Specialist, explains how to search effectively on the Internet, how to assess the value of what you find, and the best way to make full use of the resources of the Internet to trace your family's history and heritage. Topics covered include: Judging your sources Checking modern lists and resources Finding clues to primary sources Researching military records When an ancestor has a criminal record Locating photographs on the web Researching on the Internet can be fun and challenging. Online Roots makes your search more effective and creative.

The November 2020 US election was arguably the most consequential since the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln--and grassroots leaders and organizers played crucial roles in the contention for the presidency and control of both houses of Congress. Power Concedes Nothing tells the stories behind a victory that won both the White House and the Senate and powered progressive candidates to new levels of influence. It describes the on-the-ground efforts that mobilized a record-breaking turnout by registering new voters and motivating an electorate both old and new. In doing so it charts a viable path to victory for the vital contests upcoming in 2022 and 2024. Contributors include: Cliff Albright, Yong Jung Cho, Larry Cohen, Sendolo Diaminah, Neidi Dominguez, David Duhalde, Alicia Garza, Ryan Greenwood, Arisha Michelle Hatch , Jon Liss, Thenjiwe McHarris, Andrea Cristina Mercado, Maurice Mitchell, Rafael Návar, Deepak Pateriya, Ai-jen Poo, W. Mondale Robinson, Art Reyes III, Nsé Ufot and Mario Yedidia

These essays--from scholars in history, sociology, film, and media studies--interrogate Roots, assessing the ways that the book and its dramatization recast representations of slavery, labor, and the black family; reflected on the promise of freedom and civil rights; and engaged discourses of race, gender, violence, and power.

This book tells the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams--one of the most influential black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, Williams and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating "armed self-reliance" by blacks, Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba--where he broadcast "Radio Free Dixie," a program of black politics and music that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles and New York City--and then China, Williams remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life. Historians have customarily portrayed the civil rights movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience--and the subsequent rise of Black Power as a violent repudiation of the civil rights dream. But Radio Free Dixie reveals that both movements grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom. As Robert Williams's story demonstrates, independent black political action, black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in the South in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.