.  “Michael Jacoby Brown’s Building Powerful Community Organizations is a splendid “how to” book on community organizing.   I used it this semester in my community organizing class at the University of Connecticut, and the students found it tremendously helpful and highly accessible.”

-- Professor Robert Fisher, University of Connecticut

From Vol 16 (1), 2008, by Mitchell Kahn, MSW, Ramapo College of New Jersey, VP and Director of Organizing, New Jersey Tenants Organization. (excerpts):

“This no nonsense, user-friendly guidebook is replete with sound organizing advice…The book is creatively designed to actively engage the reader with the material being presented…There is a lot to chew on her, and a reader new to organizing might feel overwhelmed by this soup to nuts approach, but the book’s nicely illustrated, jargon-free, pragmatic and skilled pedagogical format makes it a wonderful textbook for teaching community organizing.”

As a teenager, I remember standing in front of the Alabama State Capitol Building, with a line of blue shirted state troopers guarding the doors, in a crowd of thousands, at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march.  I had taken a bus down from New York where I grew up and slept on the floor between the pews of a Black church in Montgomery.

Last week I walked along Back River Road in Dover, New Hampshire with a friend and our eight year old daughters, knocking on doors for Barack Obama.  Hard to believe the headlines today, and see a Black family as the first family.  It brought tears to my eyes, as I am sure it did to many. 

It is real. I know it took an amazing amount of hard work.  It took people believing, hoping, and being willing to work together for something they all knew would make a difference.  Now Barack Obama is President. Or come January 20, 2009, he will be.  Now our real work begins: to make the hope a reality.  As they say, freedom is a constant struggle.