The Barefoot Guide to Working with Orgnizations and Social Change

Farona

• Comments (3)
• Recommended (1)
• Share this story
• View profile

Tags:

• challenges and solutions
• grassroots solutions
• guide
• organization

"If you give me a fish, you have fed me for a day. If you teach me to fish, then you have fed me until the river is contaminated or the shoreline seized for development. But if you teach me to organize, then whatever the challenge, I can join together with my peers, and we will fashion our own solution."

This is a practical, do-it-yourself guide for leaders and facilitators wanting to help organisations to function and to develop in more healthy, human and effective ways as they strive to make their contributions to a more humane society.
It's purpose is to help stimulate and enrich the practice of anyone supporting organisations and social movements in their challenges of working, learning, growing and changing to meet the needs of our complex world. Although it is aimed at leaders and facilitators of civil society organisations,they hope it will be useful to anyone interested in fostering healthy human organisation in any sphere of life.

This book offers a perspective on why organisations exist, the real roles they play, and on the importance of supporting the sovereignty of local organisations and social movements for meaningful social change. You will find here a range of approaches to understanding ourselves and our roles as leaders and facilitators, as we try to understand and facilitate change in organisations. In addition, the significance of relationships and power dynamics in organisations and organisational change processes are explored. There are some tools for reading organisations, including how organisations tend to move through various phases of development, how we might facilitate change and the challenges we all face in implementing or sustaining change. Finally, the guide gives support to processes of building learning organisations, how we can continually learn both from our own experiences and the experiences of others.