Publisher's Synopsis
When decision makers fail to solve a community problem or stop a threat, citizens must act. The Organize to Win series provides ordinary people with the information they need to self-confidently organize a campaign, anticipate common challenges, and avoid the missteps new activists tend to make. With clear guidance from author Jim Britell, a savvy organizer with decades of field experience, the series shows beginners how to win a campaign without moving the problem elsewhere, pandering to foundations, or having a victory later reversed. All campaigns require productive meetings, effective letter writing, successful fundraising, lobbying, media skills, and negotiating with tough-minded professionals. Even so, ordinary people armed with the hard-earned knowledge in Organize to Win have stopped old-growth logging, ATVs, destructive mining, overfishing, public land giveaways, landfills, and phony economic development schemes.Jim Britell, a retired federal manager and labor negotiator, has led more than 100 successful grassroots environmental and political campaigns from the village to congressional level. Mark Dowie, author of Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, said of him: "I have met literally thousands of grassroots activists. Jim Britell stands head and shoulders above the crowd."Highlights of this volume of Organize To Win Lessons from Americas great grassroots campaignsThe Devil's Environmental DictionaryPitfalls of collaboration and partnership groupsThe myth of win-winmanagement problems in nonprofitsother issues of concern to activists
