About this item
A lifetime of activist experience informs this playbook for building and conducting nonviolent direct action campaigns --teaching us how to achieve real progressive change.Today's new direct action campaigns require a new, down-to-earth guide to effective campaigning. George Lakey's How We Win is that timely guide. The Women's March of January 21, 2017, was estimated at four million people - the largest assembly of activist protest in U.S. history. Many of those assembled were in the streets for the first time, or returning after a period of inactivity. Lakey, a lifelong activist, helps us understand our political moment (extreme polarization, ripe for political change) , teaches us how to plan a campaign to overcome that polarization, demonstrates how to launch these ideas into action, and shows us how to grow and sustain our movements. This is what democracy looks like.
About the Author
George Lakey, 78, recently retired from Swarthmore College where he was Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change and managed the Global Nonviolent Action Database research project (nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu) . Each of his nine published books has been about change and how to get it. He received the Martin Luther King, Jr., Peace Award, the Paul Robeson Social Justice Award, the Ashley Montague Conflict Resolution Award, was named the Peace Educator of the Year in 2010, and received the Giraffe Award for Sticking his Neck out for the Common Good.He is a Quaker, a gay man with four great-grandchildren, and plays Broadway tunes for sing-alongs. His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in, he has served as an unarmed bodyguard for human rights defenders in Sri Lanka, and recently walked 200 miles to protest mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. He has founded a number of social change organizations including Training for Change and, most recently, Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT.org) .He is a columnist for WagingNonviolence.org where he often shares lessons learned from leading over 1500 social change workshops on five continents.
