Empowerment Manual
Regular price
€31.99
Transition Town group involved in preparations for peak oil and climate change; an intentional community, founded with the highest ideals; a non-profit dedicated to social change -- millions of such voluntary groups exist around the world. These collaborative organisations have the unique potential to harness their members' ideals, passions, skills, and knowledge -- if they can succeed in getting along together. This is a comprehensive guide for groups seeking to organise with shared power and bottom-up leadership to foster vision, trust, accountability and responsibility. This desperately needed toolkit provides keys to: understanding group dynamics; facilitating communication and collective decision-making; dealing effectively with difficult people. Drawing on four decades of experience, Starhawk shows how collaborative groups can generate the co-operation, efficacy and commitment critical to success. Her extensive exploration of group process is woven together with the story of RootBound -- a fictional ecovillage mired in conflict -- and rounded out with a series of real-life case studies.
The included exercises and facilitators toolbox show how to establish the necessary structures, ground rules and healthy norms. This is required reading for anyone who wants to help their group avoid disagreement and disillusionment and become a wellspring of creativity and innovation.
StarHawk is the author of eleven books on earth based spirituality, Goddess religion, and activism, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing , and the award-winning Webs of Power . A highly influential voice for global justice and the environment, Starhawk is deeply committed to bringing the creative power of spirituality to political activism. She also teaches Earth Activist Trainings, intensive seminars that combine permaculture design, political organizing, and earth-based spirituality. She writes for the Newsweek/Washington Post blog On Faith as well as her own blog, Dirt Worship . Her website is www.starhawk.org.