Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy

This book, full of anecdotes from successful community organizations, is chockful of helpful advice, whether you're part of an organization seeking social change, or you are an individual interested in how people are effecting change in today's political climate. The worksheets on campaign planning and the chapter on media are particularly helpful. I highly recommend it.

I really found this book both inspiring and realistic. Sen acknowledges the challenges (especially in today's political climate) but lays out what it takes to get the job done. Her practical, real-world guidance walks you through organizing your local community to help achieve change and get results on the issues you care about.

Given the critical importance of social change today, it is stunning that most of the recent books on community organizing focus on personal reflections and sociological analyses instead of giving us the whole package. In "Stir It Up," Rinku Sen manages to squeeze a powerful vision, racial and social justice analysis, profiles of organizing groups, a detailed contact list of organizations and networks, and tools for creating real change into two hundred pages. This is a watershed book for the social justice organizing movement, illuminating the principles and practices that ground multi-racial, social justice, racial justice, and direct action organizations that have developed in the past twenty-five years. If you are serious about systemic change that addresses the root causes of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia, then this book offers you a framework and process for creating real change. Sections of the book go through the identification and selection of issues using a social justic lens, working with emerging constituencies, running campaigns and taking action, research, and, most critically, framing our struggles and organizations to address systemic oppression. Readers will get a clear sense of the unrelenting human movement toward freedom through profiles of extraordinary groups that continue to win both concrete change and a reordering of power in our society. Kudos to Rinku Sen for taking the time to describe the growth, development, and work of the racial and social justice movement to the world!

Passion & pragmatism don't always come together in community organzing -- kudos to Ms. Sen for showing us how to balance the two! I'm so glad that someone has finally written a comprehensive book on the strategy & practice of organizing...considering where our nation is headed, this comes not a moment too soon.