Igniting Justice and Progressive Power

Igniting Justice and Progressive Power
Author: David B. Reynolds
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2021-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000396916

A progressive resurgence is happening across the United States. This book shows how long-lasting coalitions have built progressive power from the regional level on up. Anchored by the "think and act" affiliate organizations of the Partnership for Working Families (PWF) these regional power building projects are putting in place the vision, policy agenda, political savvy, and grassroots mobilization needed for progressive governance. Through six sections, the book explores how Partnership for Working Families projects are a core part of the defeat of the right-wing in states such as California; the challenge to corporate neoliberalism in traditionally "liberal" areas; and contests for power in such formally solid red states as Arizona, Georgia, and Colorado. This book considers how these PWF groups work on economic, racial and environmental justice challenges, equitable development, and other critical issues. It addresses how, at their core, they bring together labor, community, environmental, and faith-based organizations and the coalitions and campaigns that they developed have won and continue to win substantial victories for their communities. Igniting Justice and Progressive Power will be of interest to activists and concerned citizens looking to understand how lasting political change actually happens as well as all scholars and students of social work, urban geography, political sociology, community development, social movements and political science more broadly.

The Way We Build

The Way We Build
Author: Mark Erlich
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2023-07-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0252054571

The construction trades once provided unionized craftsmen a route to the middle class and a sense of pride and dignity often denied other blue-collar workers. Today, union members still earn wages and benefits that compare favorably to those of college graduates. But as union strength has declined over the last fifty years, a growing non-union sector offers lower compensation and more hazardous conditions, undermining the earlier tradition of upward mobility. Revitalization of the industry depends on unions shedding past racial and gender discriminatory practices, embracing organizing, diversity, and the new immigrant workforce, and preparing for technological changes. Mark Erlich blends long-view history with his personal experience inside the building trades to explain one of our economy’s least understood sectors. Erlich’s multifaceted account includes the dynamics of the industry, the backdrop of union policies, and powerful stories of everyday life inside the trades. He offers a much-needed overview of construction’s past and present while exploring roads to the future.

A New New Deal

A New New Deal
Author: Amy B. Dean
Publisher: ILR Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801458498

In A New New Deal, the labor movement leaders Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds offer a bold new plan to revitalize American labor activism and build a sense of common purpose between labor and community organizations. Dean and Reynolds demonstrate how alliances organized at the regional level are the most effective tool to build a voice for working people in the workplace, community, and halls of government. The authors draw on their own successes to offer in-depth, contemporary case studies of effective labor-community coalitions. They also outline a concrete strategy for building power at the regional level. This pioneering model presents the regional building blocks for national change. A diverse audience—both within the labor movement and among its allies—will welcome this clear, detailed, and inspiring presentation of regional power-building tactics, which include deep coalition-building, leadership development, policy research, and aggressive political action. A New New Deal explores successful coalitions forged in Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, San Jose, New Haven, and Atlanta toward goals such as universal health insurance for children and sensible redevelopment efforts that benefit workers as well as businesses. The authors view partnerships between labor and grassroots organizations as a mutually beneficial strategy based on shared goals, resulting in a broadened membership base and increased organizational capacity. They make the innovative argument that the labor movement can steward both industry and community and make manifest the ways in which workplace battles are not the parochial concerns of isolated workers, but a fundamental struggle for America's future. Drawing on historical parallels, the authors illustrate how long-term collaborations between labor and community organizations are sowing the seeds of a new New Deal.

Toward Racial Justice and a Third Reconstruction

Toward Racial Justice and a Third Reconstruction
Author: Bob Wing
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 1387947532

""This collection of his always insightful writings from the last two decades allows us to trace recent challenges of left movements and to reflect on how we defeat Trump and the ultra right he has emboldened in the years to come."" ---Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. ""Bob Wing's Toward Racial Justice is crucial reading for social justice organizers and movement leaders, especially in this most consequential period of U.S. history."" ---Anthony Thigpenn, President, California Calls. ""In these incisive, original essays Bob Wing applies the hard-won lessons of his five decades in organizing to offer us powerful paths forward."" ÑJeff Chang, author, We GonÕ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation. ""This book is a critical resource for anyone seeking to make desperately needed change."" ÑAndrea Mercado, Executive Director, New Florida Majority

Progressive Community Organizing

Progressive Community Organizing
Author: Loretta Pyles
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2013-07-24
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1136271511

The second edition of Progressive Community Organizing offers a concise intellectual history of community organizing and social movements while also providing practical tools geared toward practitioner skill building. Drawing from social-constructionist, feminist and critical traditions, Progressive Community Organizing affirms the practice of issue framing and offers two innovative frameworks that will change the way students of organizing think about their work. Progressive Community Organizing is ideal for both undergraduate and graduate courses focused on community theory and practice, community organizing, community development, and social change and service learning. The second edition presents new case studies, including those of a welfare rights organization and a youth-led LGBTQ organization. There are also new sections on the capabilities approach, queer theory, the Civil Rights movement, and the practices of self-inquiry and non-violent communication. Discussion of global justice has been expanded significantly and includes an account of a transnational action-research project in post-earthquake Haiti. Each chapter contains discussion questions, written and web resources, and a list of key terms; a full, free-access companion website is also available for the book.

Divine Rebels

Divine Rebels
Author: Deena Guzder
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2011-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1569768706

In an effort to reclaim the fundamental principles of Christianity, moving it away from religious right-wing politics and towards the teachings of Jesus, the American Christian activists profiled in this book agitate for a society free from racism, patriarchy, bigotry, retribution, ecocide, torture, poverty, and militarism. These activists view their faith as a personal commitment with public implications; their world consists of people of religious faith protecting the weak and safeguarding the sacred. Recounting social justice activists on the frontlines of the Christian Left since the 1950s--including Daniel Berrigan, Roy Bourgeois, and SueZann Bosler--this book articulates their faith-based alternative to the mainstream conservative religious agenda and liberal cynicism and describes a long-standing American tradition, which began with the nation's earliest Quaker abolitionists.

Firestorm

Firestorm
Author: Edward Struzik
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2017-10-05
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1610918185

"Frightening...Firestorm comes alive when Struzik discusses the work of offbeat scientists." —New York Times Book Review "Comprehensive and compelling." —Booklist "A powerful message." —Kirkus "Should be required reading." —Library Journal For two months in the spring of 2016, the world watched as wildfire ravaged the Canadian town of Fort McMurray. Firefighters named the fire “the Beast.” It acted like a mythical animal, alive with destructive energy, and they hoped never to see anything like it again. Yet it’s not a stretch to imagine we will all soon live in a world in which fires like the Beast are commonplace. A glance at international headlines shows a remarkable increase in higher temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands– a trifecta for igniting wildfires like we’ve rarely seen before. This change is particularly noticeable in the northern forests of the United States and Canada. These forests require fire to maintain healthy ecosystems, but as the human population grows, and as changes in climate, animal and insect species, and disease cause further destabilization, wildfires have turned into a potentially uncontrollable threat to human lives and livelihoods. Our understanding of the role fire plays in healthy forests has come a long way in the past century. Despite this, we are not prepared to deal with an escalation of fire during periods of intense drought and shorter winters, earlier springs, potentially more lightning strikes and hotter summers. There is too much fuel on the ground, too many people and assets to protect, and no plan in place to deal with these challenges. In Firestorm, journalist Edward Struzik visits scorched earth from Alaska to Maine, and introduces the scientists, firefighters, and resource managers making the case for a radically different approach to managing wildfire in the 21st century. Wildfires can no longer be treated as avoidable events because the risk and dangers are becoming too great and costly. Struzik weaves a heart-pumping narrative of science, economics, politics, and human determination and points to the ways that we, and the wilder inhabitants of the forests around our cities and towns, might yet flourish in an age of growing megafires.

Moonrise

Moonrise
Author: Ines Johnson
Publisher: Those Johnson Girls
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2016-08-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

This Alpha's gonna take a bite out of his brother's fake fiancée. Sheltered Lucia is determined to find a new life and love. No wonder she falls for the first guy to flash her a wolfish smile her first day in the big city. After rescuing the charming shifter from certain death, she's sure he feels the same way about her, and will tell her so — just as soon as he wakes up from his coma. To stay by her instalove’s side in the hospital, Lucia pretends she's his bonded mate. This twist of the truth takes a turn when she meets her fake fiancé’s sexy older brother and wonders if she was a bit too hasty in declaring love-at-first-sight the first time. For months, Jackson has sensed that his fated mate was near. When he enters his brother's hospital room, he instantly pounces on the beautiful, curvaceous woman there. He’s ready to mark her as his own until he discovers his brother may have gotten there first. The more Jackson gets to know Lucia, the more his doubts about the engagement grow. She has nothing in common with his wayward, lone wolf brother. But she sure does check every one of Jackson's boxes. Lucia longs to explore her feelings for Jackson, but how can she turn her back on the comatose wolf she lied about being engaged to? Jackson's fighting a losing battle with his wolf to claim the woman who should be his. When he finds proof that Lucia isn't who she claims to be, can he still trust her with his heart? And what will happen when his brother, her fake-mate, wakes up? Moonrise is the first in a paranormal romance series full of alpha men and the strong, capable women that bend them to their knees. If you like a touch of magic in your romance novels, then you’ll love the witches, fairies, and wolves in the dystopian world of the moonkind. Buy Ines Johnson’s Moonrise today and find yourself caught in the moonglow of this paranormal romance filled with instalove gone hilariously wrong, overbearing families who’ll warm your heart, and the sensuous heat that only happens between fated mates.

Moral Minority

Moral Minority
Author: David R. Swartz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2012-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812207688

In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America." The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong—evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way—organizationally and through political activism—to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.