When you change your life, your life changes! Two caterpillars were crawling along a tree branch one day when a butterfly flew overhead. One caterpillar said to the other, "You will never get me up in one of those things." Shift Happens! is about personal alchemy and inner transformation. Some people "go" through life; and other people "grow" through life. Shift Happens! ­celebrates your unlimited potential to grow, blossom, and evolve-in spite of everything. It is a book of hope. The term personal alchemy describes the ability to take a piece of dirt, roll it around a few times, and fashion it into a pearl. This is what an oyster does. Personal alchemy is what your grandmother called turning lemons into lemonade. It is what old wizards described as turning straw into gold. Shift Happens! is about staying open all hours for miracles. Success, love, and happiness are only ever one thought away at most. One new perception, one fresh thought, one act of surrender, one change of heart, one leap of faith, can change your life forever. Discover: - How to choose happiness and allow yourself to relax - The route to forgiveness and releasing yourself from past traumas - Harness stress to take you to new heights of success - How to develop trust and let go of your fear Kickstart change in your life today!

If you are ready to explore and implement a unique approach to engage historically excluded rural voices in community development efforts, this toolkit is required reading. Through the valuable tools, best practices, processes, resources, and stories contained here, you will advance your efforts to mobilize community members and agency partners to address deeply rooted inequities in rural communities.This toolkit is for any nonprofit, funder, government agency, community organizer, or volunteer who wants to catalyze rural communities to action by tapping into and honoring the history, wisdom, knowledge, experience, and ideas of local leaders.We invite you to learn from, and adapt, this toolkit to fit within your own context. Our ultimate hope for you is that, with this toolkit in hand, you are able to uncover, empower, and ignite the rich history and legacy of rural community organizing that has taken place all over the world.

A new anthology celebrating the accomplishments of the Critical Mass movement over the past twenty years. From both theoretical and practical perspectives, the book explores how Critical Mass has gone around the world, how it has evolved along the way, and the impacts it has had on local politics, transportation, and cultures. Includes contributions from San Francisco, Paris, Chicago, Los Angeles, Puerto Elegre, Manchester, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Rome, São Paulo, A Coruña, Guadalajara, Nuevo León, Budapest, Prague, Helsinki, Ponce, Mexico City, Bilbao, Baton Rouge, Capetown, Vigo, Naples, New York City, Portland, London, Berkeley, Florianopolis, Calais, Dubai, and Palestine!

Nautilus Book Award Winner: An “engagingly written” behavioral science-based guide to tackling our urgent environmental problems (Robert B. Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion). To create a sustainable future and achieve positive, durable change, we must design solutions based directly on how people think, make decisions, and act. From hotels that save water (and money) using simple signage to energy suppliers that boost participation in renewable energy programs through mere enrollment-form tweaks, it’s clear that shifting the behavior of millions for the better is possible. Based on decades of research into what drives behavior change, Making Shift Happen provides a suite of powerful tools to transform the world. It features A-to-Z guidance on how to design a behavior change initiative—from choosing the right audience and uncovering what drives their behavior to designing, prototyping, testing, and implementation. Clear instructions and real-world examples empower you to apply hundreds of behavioral science solutions including: Using social norms to spread positive environmental behaviors Selecting and testing stories, metaphors, and values to frame information for each audience Catalyzing action by aligning your initiative with your audience’s personal and social motivators Breaking bad habits and building positive ones Capturing your audience’s attention and reducing barriers to action Connecting people with nature and building empathy for the environment and its inhabitants Making Shift Happen is a must-have guide for practitioners in non-profits, governments, and businesses looking to design successful campaigns and initiatives that shift behaviors and mindsets toward positive environmental outcomes and a better future for all. “Completely fascinating—we’ve learned a lot about the ways minds work in the last decades and that may help us figure out how to appeal to our better angels more effectively than in the past. Rest assured that people who want to sell us junk are paying attention to these insights—the rest of us better do so too!” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Discover how those who change the world do so with this thoughtful and timely book Why do some changes occur, and others don't? What are the factors that drive successful social and environmental movements, while others falter? How Change Happens examines the leadership approaches, campaign strategies, and ground-level tactics employed in a range of modern social change campaigns. The book explores successful movements that have achieved phenomenal impact since the 1980s—tobacco control, gun rights expansion, LGBT marriage equality, and acid rain elimination. It also examines recent campaigns that seem to have fizzled, like Occupy Wall Street, and those that continue to struggle, like gun violence prevention and carbon emissions reduction. And it explores implications for movements that are newly emerging, like Black Lives Matter. By comparing successful social change campaigns to the rest, How Change Happens reveals powerful lessons for changemakers who seek to impact society and the planet for the better in the 21st century. Author Leslie Crutchfield is a writer, lecturer, social impact advisor, and leading authority on scaling social innovation. She is Executive Director of the Global Social Enterprise Initiative (GSEI) at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and co-author of two previous books, Forces for Good and Do More than Give. She serves as a senior advisor with FSG, the global social impact consulting firm. She is frequently invited to speak at nonprofit, philanthropic, and corporate events, and has appeared on shows such as ABC News Now and NPR, among others. She is an active media contributor, with pieces appearing in The Washington Post. Fortune.com, CNN/Money and Harvard Business Review.com. Examines why some societal shifts occur, and others don't Illustrates the factors that drive successful social and environmental movements Looks at the approaches, strategies, and tactics that changemakers employ in order to effect widescale change Whatever cause inspires you, advance it by applying the must-read advice in How Change Happens—whether you lead a social change effort, or if you’re tired of just watching from the outside and want to join the fray, or if you simply want to better understand how change happens, this book is the place to start.

SashaBoth of my dads were always attentive and loving, but they were also smothering. Leaving for college caused them more anxiety than it caused me. I was excited about having freedom and laying the foundations for my future and my career. Yeah, I have two of them, so you can imagine the bullying I had as a kid. But I wouldn't change them for the world, it's just that I needed to find my own place in it.How's this for irony: I tasted freedom, I touched it with my fingertips, then I got a sinus infection, hit by the car he was driving, and now he's insisting on helping me recuperate in exchange for not telling my dads about it.He didn't need to do it, but when I said no, he proved he'd become an adult version of the irritating kid I remembered. JacksonI did my parents and their friends a favor and checked in on Sasha to make sure she was doing okay at college. I hadn't forgotten the little girl who used to come over with her dads, I just hadn't thought about her. It's a totally different thing.I wasn't a jock, I was here for my education, and I had zero-tolerance for distractions. I got enough of those from my family, so this time at college was my own. So it was only meant to be that one visit, but now I can't stop thinking about her. Especially after I hit her with my car and now I'm looking after her. Except, that started as guilt, and now it's something completely different.Read the series: Great SassShift Happen

In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride! adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.

In this book, Ghil'ad Zuckermann introduces revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration. Applying lessons from the Hebrew revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary endangered languages, Zuckermann takes readers along a fascinating and multifaceted journey into language revival and provides new insights into language genesis. Beginning with a critical analysis of Israeli-the language resulting from the Hebrew revival-Zuckermann's radical theory contradicts conventional accounts of the Hebrew revival and challenges the family tree model of historical linguistics. Revivalistics demonstrates how grammatical cross-fertilization with the revivalists' mother tongues is inevitable in the case of successful "revival languages." The second part of the book then applies these lessons from the Israeli language to revival movements in Australia and globally, describing the "why" and "how" of revivalistics. With examples from the Barngarla Aboriginal language of South Australia, Zuckermann proposes ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian reasons for language revival and offers practical methods for reviving languages. Based on years of the author's research, fieldwork, and personal experience with language revivals all over the globe, Revivalistics offers ground-breaking theoretical and pragmatic contributions to the field of language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration.

If You Cannot See A Strong Future For Your Children, Who Will? The number one weakness for every child is a mother's worry. Every single thought you have about your children has the potential to strengthen or weaken them! Mothers are taught and encouraged to worry about their children as a badge of honor, instead of honoring their intuition to create a better future for every child. Many people who shift out of limiting beliefs and expectations break into peals of laughter as they recognize how they have participated in what just might be a giant cosmic joke... The truth is funny! Often, stranger than fiction! A word of caution... If you prefer the status quo and you are not interested in improving every aspect of your life... This book will trigger the shift out of you!

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.