A handbook for aspiring activists that readers will find to be both inspiring and practical.
Daley-Harris details the history of his successful citizens’ lobbyist group and sketches a blueprint for others to follow.
The author’s nonprofit lobbying group, RESULTS, whose name once stood for “Responsibility for Ending Starvation Using Legislation, Trimtabbing, and Support,” was founded in 1980 in Southern California as a small group of friends writing letters to elected officials to help fight poverty and world hunger. Decades later, it’s blossomed into a considerable organization with chapters all over the world, and it’s one that’s been widely recognized for helping to reduce malnutrition and preventable disease with what Daley-Harris calls “transformational advocacy.” As he sees it, his success was a function of this deliberate approach, which he sharply contrasts with that typically practiced by many larger organizations, a strategy that “disempowers the average citizen.” The author distills transformational advocacy into three practical parts, which he articulates with impressive clarity. First, such advocacy requires an organizational structure that provides support for its volunteers with a clarity of mission purpose and a set of high expectations. Second, it features a disciplined plan for outreach that not only produces letters to elected officials and editorials to newspapers, but also cultivates close personal relationships with politicians and journalists. Finally, and most importantly, the author focuses insistently on the empowering value of idealism—the sense that one can truly make a difference: “This idealism includes holding ourselves and our governments accountable to our greatest ideals. If government is broken, we are part of that brokenness and must engage in healing ourselves too.”
Daley-Harris’ approach to explicating transformational advocacy is eclectic. He furnishes a history of his own group, personal testimonials from those who’ve worked within it, and an account of the success of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, the first organization to replicate the specific methodology of RESULTS. The author’s focus is less on limning a conceptual framework to be copied, though, and more on concrete illustrations that show transformational advocacy in action. As a result, this is a thoroughly practical work that could serve as an instructional guidebook for those looking to start their own advocacy group, or who simply wish to become more involved as individuals. Aside from all the practical instruction, including how to become an effective spokesperson, Daley-Harris explains what he sees as the proper mindset of the activist: a psychological comportment that’s unabashedly and cheerfully optimistic and freed from the expectation of failure. In short, he writes, activists must come to see themselves as leaders who are capable of changing things: “With transformational advocacy, volunteers are trained, encouraged, and then succeed at doing things they never thought they could do as advocates—accomplishments like meeting with members of Congress and bringing them on board and enlisting editors to write about their issue—and, as a result…they see themselves as community leaders.” Overall, the author’s analysis of effective action is as persuasive as it is accessible, and his call to democratic participation is inspiring.
A handbook for aspiring activists that readers will find to be both inspiring and practical.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781953943347
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
