Re:Imagining Change and Creative Community Organizing
Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-Based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World
By Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Channing
PM Press, 2010, 135 pages (paper), $16.95
Creative Community Organizing: A Guide for Rabble-Rousers, Activists & Quiet Lovers of Justice
By Si Kahn; Forewords by Angela Davis and Jim Hightower
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010, 210 pages (paper), $17.95
Reviewed by Jim Scheibel
This fall’s startling news — that the U.S. poverty rate has reached a record-high 14.3 percent, and that we have added 6.3 million people to the ranks of the poor since 2007 — calls for some serious action. Two recent books, Re:Imagining Change by Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning, and Creative Community Organizing by Si Kahn, provide valuable information on how to mobilize our communities. They also emphasize how essential creativity is to good organizing.
Both books offer change agents some resources, tools, a little theory. But they also emphasize the power of storytelling. Reinsborough and Canning give us a number of case studies (stories) and Kahn shares his memoir, a splendid story of a lifetime of work for social justice. Common to both books are the themes of building from the grassroots and awareness of culture in building and communicating.
Organizing is hard work — it involves building relationships, critical thinking, action, and reflection. The writers emphasize the importance of using all of these for social change.
Re:Imagining Change was created by and for the current and next generation of activists. It is an introduction to the ideas and methods of the smartMeme Strategy and Training Project. SmartMeme’s mission is to apply the power of narrative to organizing, movement building, and social transformation.
I was curious: just what is a “meme”? The word “meme” (which rhymes with dream) is a tool for exploring cultural influence and the ways in which narrative power operates. Okay, you want examples? Think of “Just Do It” or “Si se puede!” or a “free trade” sticker on a bag of coffee beans. Those phrases communicate a message to us and bring stories into our head.
You can call Re:Imagining “part textbook” because it has handy diagrams and charts for a framework to create and share our stories. The handbook helps us become aware of some myth busting we must do in order to communicate and create a powerful message. I liked the example it provided of Thanksgiving; how accurate is the snapshot of the rosy relationship between European colonizers and native people?
Case studies in Re:Imagining turn theory into real-life examples, and lead us to think “this makes sense” and “I can apply this to my work.”
Creative Community Organizing is the Si Kahn’s own story, released earlier this year as he left his position as president of Grassroots Leadership after 40 years of heading its work for civil rights and economic justice. (Kahn is now continuing his contribution to the movement as a distinguished senior fellow at Demos, the public policy research and advocacy organization.)
The book builds on two of Kahn’s previous organizing handbooks: How People get Power and Organizing and The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. This volume is Kahn’s story about how he has put theory into action. We follow this troubadour and organizer from his days in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to mobilizing mine workers and then clothing workers. His passion and focus in recent years has been Grassroots Leaderships’ campaign to abolish all for-profit prisons, jails, and detention centers.
In his latest book, Kahn shares words from some of his songs, and readers may find themselves humming as they read. Kahn is a Pete Seeger or Peter Yarrow, who in addition to being singers are organizers. Kahn’s “Community Organizing Top 20” should be bookmarked on laptops or posted in the office, along with his reminder that organizers can’t just start something, they also have to maintain what they have built.
Bringing about a transformed world will take the ingenuity and experimentation that these three writers encourage. Such ingenuity will need to take into consideration the rich culture that makes up our diverse communities. After reading both these books, I feel encouraged and hopeful because I know there are people of every generation ready to carry on this important work. Both books belong on any organizer’s bookshelf. These writer-activists’ vision of social justice is so inspiring that readers will want to answer Kahn’s call “for us all to pull our shift.”
Jim Scheibel, a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, is executive-in-residence at Hamline University’s School of Business in St. Paul, Minnesota.
