Just read Presence, a book by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. 

The book is about how we think and how we think affects how we can change the world.  It combines modern physics, spirituality, sociology,  meditation practice, politics and more. 

Some of the best parts of the book are its stories.  It includes a fascinating narrative of a grass-roots health care initiative in Germany, where doctors, patients and other community members met and designed ways to make their health care system better. Here in the USA, where we are stuck on getting insurance for all, it is helpful to read this (pp 154 ff) to think about what we really want health care to be, even if everyone were insured.  The problem (and the solution) around health care is not only access, but what kind of care we should have.  This example describes methods and importance of community input   This narrative helps us understand that health care should not only be a service that doctors provide — but rather a system that all of us must create.

I have a question for the authors about their  values.  They challenge making money as the most important value. However, their examples are mostly about innovation in for-profit companies.  They tout a new development at The Gap.  They describe how VISA created a new business model, but they don’t challenge  the need for a new line of clothes (made where and by whom?) or the overall effect ...   more »

Just read Kristin Layng Szakos and Joe Szakos’s new book, We Make Change: Community Organizers Talk About What they Do — and Why and really liked it.  This is probably one of the few good books where you will find stories about what organizers do and what they think about what they do.  Full disclosure:  Joe Szakos, the Director of the Virginia Organizing Project, has bought about 70 copies of my book and is also sending out information about my book along with his, and I am doing likewise.  I have lots of flyers for his book and send them out whenever I send out a book for review or when someone buys one.

I am also reading, at the suggestion of the great folks at the Center for Reflective Community Practice at MIT, Presence, by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski and Flowers.  Also, at their suggestion, Squirrel, Inc, a Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling, by Stephen Denning.  Both thought-provoking about how to make social change, and how much, we ourselves —and our thinking  — have to change, as well as “society” and the powers that be.  Also very hopeful, for those in us in non-profit land, about how some people in the corporate world also want real change.  Many seem to be realizing that the way things are is not working for them either.

I am also working with Vision-Inc , a wonderful group that does training across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, etc.  (see www.Vision-Inc.org)

I will ...   more »

From the ARK,  Summer 2007”

….an excellent resource for community leaders, front-line organizers and social justice practitioners..What Brown delivers is a practical, much-n needed skills-building manual for a wide range of readers.  Beginners will fine the broad guide to the work and step-by-step instructions in everyday language.  Veteran organizers will find critical points for reflection, evaluation and re-orientation.  And those charged with training new staff and leaders will appreciate the wealth of exercises and worksheets.”

The first printing is just about gone and the book will be available widely thru our new distributor, Independent Publishers Group of Chicago. (See My First Year as a Published Author — for more details on this.)

The book has been reviewed in in “print” in library Journal, (starred review and highly recommended) Social Policy magazine, Shelterforce, Z-News, Ralph Nader’s 2007 Summer Reading list on his blog, the ARK magazine of the National Organizers Alliance (full disclosure, I serve on its Board of Directors). I have sent out about 300 review copies, including desk copies to professors who are using or will use the book.  Numerous others have praised it.  (see Reactions on About the Book from the home page)

Other media we have sent review copies to and are trying to get reviews in include: Boston Review, Boston Phoenix, ADA Today, Against the Current, City Limits (NYC), Counterpunch, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Democratic Left, Development Connections, Disclosure, Dissent, Dollars and Sense, the American Prospect, Educators for Social Responsibility, Fourth World Movement Newsletter, Friends of the Earth newsletter, Imagine, In These Times, Corporate Accountability News (formerly INFACT), Journal of Democracy, Journal of Politics, Labor Notes, LULAC News, MS Magazine, Multi-National Monitor, The National, National Civic Review (Giovanna Negretti of OISTE? has agreed to write a review for them, and will coordinate with their editor in Denver, Mike McGrath), Bloomsbury Review (Minnesota)  Book Page, College and Research Libraries News,  Kirkus Reviews,  New York Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi ...   more »

Book Review by Ron Jacobs

Hayden, Tom, Ending the War in Iraq Akashic Books 2007

Brown, Michael J., Building Powerful Community Organizations: A Personal Guide to Creating Groups That Can Solve Problems and Change the World Long Haul Press 2007

Tom Hayden' has credentials when it comes to movements opposing war and racism. From the early days of the original SDS to the Chicago 8, his Berkeley days with the Red Family collective to his time in the California legislature and today, his approaches have included confrontation, mass rallies and lobbying. Likewise, his theoretical takes have gone from ending a particular war to revolution to reform. Hayden utilizes this experience quite wisely in his new book Ending the War in Iraq, at least to a point

…
A section of Hayden's book is dedicated towards organizing tactics--all of which are useful despite their brevity. If the reader wants to explore the tactics and strategies of organizing in more detail, however, let me recommend Building Powerful Community Organizations: A Personal Guide to Creating Groups That Can Solve Problems and Change the World by veteran organizer Michael Brown. This text is reminiscent of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals and could play as important a role in the future as Alinsky's text did for organizers in the 1970s.

Going well beyond Hayden's brief but useful suggestions on organizing against the war in one's community, Brown's book is a veritable step-by-step guide to creating and maintaining a viable and effective grassroots organization. He intersperses ...   more »

First off, thank you for subscribing to my newsletter.  Some of you may have subscribed a year ago and forgot you did.  Some might have done so more recently.  But rest assured this is not spam.  This is Michael Jacoby Brown writing to you and thanking you for waiting (if you were waiting!) for the newsletter you signed up for.

I never really thought I would ever publish a book.  I started writing it about 12 years ago, first writing some stories about organizing,  and I have a learned a lot  — not only about writing a book, but, more importantly, how to distribute and sell it.  It does not do much good to write a book, and spend years doing so, if no one gets to read it.  And with about 300,000 books published every year (I think that is the figure — but in any case it is a lot!) it takes a lot to get noticed.  And I have been hard at work at getting noticed.

Since I published this book myself, and set up my own “publishing company” to do so, it has been a steep learning curve.  Some of the learning has been fun and some frustrating.  But when all the books arrived on a big truck on a clear summer day in June 2006, and we unloaded the ballets of 84 boxes  (2,000) of books on my driveway, I guess we were in business.  Luckily it was not raining that day and my wife ...   more »