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 be in Washington DC, July 17 to 20 for the Board meeting of the National Organizers Alliance, and back there August 13, (see schedule) for a Neighbor Works conference of Neighborhood Re-Investment.

I will also be in Hartford in September training local community organizers, via the Community Learning Project, run by Andy Mott, doing the training with Soyun Park of Washington, D.C.

I am still having trouble finishing the Digital Story I was given as a present by the folks at the Jewish Organizing Initiative at my going-away party in February 2007.  I have written a couple stories to put into a digital format but they do not seem right, not yet.  There are some great short (4 minutes) digital stories about social change on storylink and other similar websites. 

I have also found the new website, www.DroppingKnowledge.org,  an amazing new way to organize people, by asking questions and presenting those questions on very short video segments on the web.  Powerful nd thought-provoking.  Check it out.