Organizing for Power and Empowerment: The Fight for Democracy

Through entirely new interviews, Organizing for Power and Empowerment: The Fight for Democracy features the voices and experiences of more than forty organizers, telling the stories of twenty geographically and racially diverse progressive organizations. The authors highlight how organizations use innovative new strategies, like targeting corporate expansion, operating at statewide levels, building new structures for electoral action, and establishing community-labor coalitions to win on such critical issues as worker protections, bail reform, immigration, climate change, and affordable housing. The book describes organizations working across a range of issues. The organizers discuss campaigns that activate people around issues that matter in their daily lives--work schedules, bail reform, schools, voting, and affordable housing--and connect them to broader topics such as racial justice, immigration, climate change, criminal justice, and workers' rights. They share their thoughts on building community organizations and empowering ordinary citizens to become leaders. The book underscores the leadership of Black Americans, other people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people as they lead campaigns to address the disparate effects of inequality faced by their communities. It provides detailed analysis of the new and effective organizational structures and change strategies, and sheds important new light on foundational organizing practices, innovations, and the challenges and opportunities for progressive social action today.

About the Author :
Jacqueline Mondros is professor and dean emeritus of Stony Brook University School of Social Welfare and a past president of the National Association of Deans and Directors of Social Work. With more than twenty-five publications in community organizing, including coauthoring the first edition of Organizing for Power and Empowerment (Columbia, 1994), she has organized in Philadelphia, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Joan Minieri is a longtime leader in the field of social action and has organized in New York and nationally. She is the coauthor of Tools for Radical Democracy: How to Organize for Power in Your Community (2007).

Review :
Mondros and Minieri break important new ground in this timely second edition, examining the evolution of progressive social-action organizing over the past twenty-five years. They broaden, deepen, and strengthen the original analysis with special focus on intersectional injustice, expanded corporate power, inequality, and a multiracial, feminist framework for organizing.--Lee Staples, Boston University This book is an urgently needed account of how people can act together through organizing to realize a shared vision of a more just world. The organizations profiled in this book teach us how to make real the most fundamental promises of democracy.--Hahrie Han, Johns Hopkins University The organizing work profiled in this book represents our best hope at defeating the rising tides of racial intolerance and corporate malfeasance. Filled with lessons learned from organizing in cities, towns, and suburbs across the United States, Organizing for Power and Empowerment offers a roadmap out of the isolation and marginalization so many individuals face toward collective racial, gender, and economic transformation.--Zach Norris, author Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment