Maria Avila presents a personal account of her experience as a teenager working in a factory in Ciudad Juarez to how she got involved in community organizing. She has since applied the its distinctive practices of community organizing to civic engagement in higher education, demonstrating how this can help create a culture that values and rewards civically engaged scholarship and advance higher education’s public, democratic mission.Adapting what she learned during her years as an organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation, she describes a practice that aims for full reciprocity between partners and is achieved through the careful nurturing of relationships, a mutual understanding of personal narratives, leadership building, power analysis, and critical reflection. She demonstrates how she implemented the process in various institutions and in various contexts and shares lessons learned. Community organizing recognizes the need to understand the world as it is in order to create spaces where stakeholders can dialogue and deliberate about strategies for creating the world as we would like it to be. Maria Avila offers a vision and process that can lead to creating institutional change in higher education, in communities surrounding colleges and universities, and in society at large.This book is a narrative of her personal and professional journey and of how she has gone about co-creating spaces where democracy can be enacted and individual, institutional, and community transformation can occur. In inviting us to experience the process of organizing, and in keeping with its values and spirit, she includes the voices of the participants in the initiatives in which she collaborated – stakeholders ranging from community partners to faculty, students, and administrators in higher education.

Why are some civic associations better than others at getting-and keeping-people involved in activism? Using in-person observations, surveys, and field experiments, this book compares and describes contemporary models for engaging activists to show the effectiveness of one that combine political activism with transformative personal and collective growth.

Real stories of hard-fought battles for social change, told by those on the front lines—with clear lessons and tips for activists on gaining power from the ground up “As protests and demonstrations sprout across the land, young organizers and activists need to know why and how movements are sustained and how they grow. That resource has arrived.” —Mumia Abu-Jamal, author and activist In this visually rich and deeply inspiring book, the leaders of some of the most successful movements of the past decade—from the legalization of same-sex marriage to the Black Lives Matter movement—distill their wisdom, sharing lessons of what makes transformative social change possible. Longtime social activist Greg Jobin-Leeds joins forces with AgitArte, a collective of artists and organizers, to capture the stories, philosophy, tactics, and art of today’s leading social movements. When We Fight, We Win! weaves together interviews with today’s most successful activists and artists from across the country and beyond—including Patrisse Cullors, Bill McKibben, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Karen Lewis, Favianna Rodriguez, Rea Carey, and Gaby Pacheco, among others—with narrative recountings of their inspiring strategies and campaigns alongside full-color photos. It includes a foreword by Rinku Sen and an afterword by Antonia Darder. The recent nationwide explosion of protests has shown the power the people have when we join together with a common goal and compelling message. When We Fight, We Win! will give a whole generation of readers the road map to building resilient movements that can achieve real social justice.

Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education is a book for anyone with an interest in teaching and learning in higher education from a social justice perspective and with a commitment to teaching all students. This text offers a breadth of disciplinary perspectives on how to center difference, power, and systemic oppression in pedagogical practice, arguing that these elements are essential to knowledge formation and to teaching. Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education is structured as an ongoing conversation among educators who believe that teaching from a social justice perspective is about much more than the type of readings and assignments found on course syllabi. Drawing on the broadest possible definition of curriculum transformation, the volume demonstrates that social justice education is about both educators’ social locations and about course content. It is also about knowing students and teaching beyond the traditional classroom to meaningfully include local communities, social movements, archives, and colleagues in student and academic affairs. Premised on the notion that continuous learning and growth is critical to educators with deep commitments to fostering critical consciousness through their teaching, Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education offers interdisciplinary and innovative collaborative approaches to curriculum transformation that build on and extend existing scholarship on social justice education. Newly committed and established social justice pedagogues share their experiences taking up the many difficult questions pertaining to what it means for all of us to participate in shaping a more just, shared future.

This timely book addresses assumptions and challenges inherent within community engagement as a catalyst for developing students’ sense of civic responsibility at a time of rampant social polarization. Promoting academic development and life skills through the high-impact practice of service-learning, the book explores a new ecological framework for reflecting on and improving practice. This book describes new models such as the #CaliforniansForAll College Corps, offers advice on coalition building, and presents the narratives of community-engaged professionals and faculty, offering a sense both of tensions inherent in this work and examples of initiatives in local contexts. Chapters primarily reflect on what action is required for fulfilling our public purpose and what’s holding us back. This book provides guidance, examples, and benchmarks for best practices in community engagement that are particularly relevant to this time of crises and unrest and will be relevant to community-engaged professionals, higher education faculty, and college administrators.

Building Collective Leadership for Culture Change shows how five community engagement research projects in the greater Los Angeles area were able to create more collaborative and participatory cultures in their academic institutions and nonacademic settings by using community organizing, research in action, and narrative inquiry. These projects focused on incorporating civic engagement into the work of scholars, creating a civic engagement minor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, integrating community organizing practices within the Los Angeles Unified School District, and building a regional organizing network among civically engaged higher education institutions. As the case studies authored by Maria Avila and her collaborators show, these projects succeeded because they took place in collaborative spaces where participants were part of designing the purpose, goals, and specific actions to create culture change. Building Collective Leadership for Culture Change is a vital inquiry into the possibilities of collective interpretation of accomplishments among researchers and participants.

“This country's leading hell-raiser" (The Nation) shares his impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” First published in 1971 and written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.

Drawing on first-hand accounts of action research in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, The Heart of Community Engagement illustrates the transformative learning journeys of exemplary catalysts for community-based change. Practitioners’ stories of community engagement for social justice in the Global South elucidate the moments of insight and transformation that deepened their practice: how to deal with uncertainty, recognize their own blind spots, become aware of what is emergent and possible in the moment, and weave an inclusive bond of love, respect, and purpose. Each successive narrative adds a deeper level of understanding of the inner practice of community engagement. The stories illuminate the reflective, or inner, practice of the outside change agent, whether a planner, designer, participatory action researcher, or community development practitioner. From a shantytown in South Africa, to a rural community in India, or an informal settlement in peri-urban Mexico, the stories focus attention on the greatest leverage point for change that we, as engaged practitioners, have: our own self-awareness. By the end of the book, the practitioners are not only aware of their own conditioned beliefs and assumptions, but have opened their minds and hearts to the complex and dynamic patterns of emergent change that is possible. This book serves as a much-needed reader of practice stories to help instructors and students find the words, concepts, and examples to talk about their own subjective experience of community engagement practice. The book applies some of the leading-edge concepts from organizational development and leadership studies to the fields of planning, design, and community engagement practice. Key concepts include the deep dive of sensing the social field, seeing the whole, and presencing the emergent future. The book also provides a creative bridge between participatory action research and design thinking: user-based design, rapid prototyping, and learning from doing.

In recent years, the engagement of stakeholders has become imperative for the overall success of an organization. As the global business landscape continues to evolve, promoting modern leadership techniques and engagement with the community have become two key tactics for organizations to remain competitive in the current market. Understanding and implementing these methodologies is pivotal for professionals and researchers around the globe. Civic Engagement Frameworks and Strategic Leadership Practices for Organization Development is a critical reference source that provides vital research on the implementation of strategic leadership techniques for promoting civic engagement and sustaining organizational success. While highlighting topics such as social media strategies, analytical tools, and ethical interventions, this book is ideally designed for managers, executives, politicians, researchers, business specialists, government professionals, consultants, academicians, and students seeking current research on the use of civic engagement and strategic leadership initiatives for the overall development of organizations.

In the face of authoritarian, divisive trends and multiplying crises, when politics-as-usual is stymied, Awakening Democracy through Public Work shows it is possible to build foundations for a democratic awakening grounded in deep American traditions of a citizen-centered commonwealth. Awakening Democracy through Public Work begins with the story of Public Achievement, a youth civic education and empowerment initiative with roots in the civil rights movement. It describes Public Achievement's first home in St. Bernard's, a low-income Catholic elementary school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and how the program spread across the country and then abroad, giving birth to the larger concept of public work. In Public Achievement, young people practice "citizen politics" as they tackle issues ranging from bullying, racism, and sexual harassment to playground improvements, curriculum changes, and better school lunches. They develop everyday political skills for working across differences and making constructive change. Such citizen politics, more like jazz than a set piece of music, involves the interplay and negotiation of diverse interests and views, sometimes contentious, sometimes harmonious. Public Achievement highlights young people's roles as co-creators—builders of schools, communities, and democratic society. They are not citizens in waiting, but active citizens who do public work. Awakening Democracy through Public Work also describes how public work can find expression in many kinds of work, from education and health to business and government. It is relevant across the sweep of society. People have experimented with the idea of public work in hundreds of settings in thirty countries, from Northern Ireland and Poland to Ghana and Japan. In Burundi it birthed a national initiative to rework relations between villagers and police. In South Africa it helped people in poor communities to see themselves as problem solvers rather than simply consumers of government services. In the US, at Denison University, public work is being integrated into dorm life. At Maxfield School in St. Paul, it is transforming special education. In rural Missouri, it led to the "emPowerU" initiative of the Heartland Foundation, encouraging thousands of young people to stay in the region. In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, it generated "Clear Vision," a program providing government support for citizen-led community improvements. Public work has expanded into the idea of "citizen professionals" working with other citizens, not on them or for them. It has also generated the idea of "civic science," in which scientists see themselves as citizens and science as a resource for civic empowerment. Awakening Democracy through Public Work shows that we can free the productive powers of people to work across lines and differences to build a better society and create grounded hope for the future.