Changemakers: Embracing Hope, Taking Action, and Transforming the World

• The guidebook for ordinary people who want to create a new society now rather than wait for a pie-in-the-sky future. • With every news report, the world seems to be careening off the rails. It's all too easy to slip into despair waiting for co-opted, self-serving governments to act. • The antidote to fear and despair is hope and action. We each hold the power to make personal changes that can drive local changes and cascade into large-scale social transformation. • This is the guidebook for ordinary people who want to create a new society now. The first section explores the idea of transformative change - what it is, what difference it makes, and how it is connected to learning. • The second section explores powerful new stories of everyday people who have challenged traditional understandings of food, shelter, energy, transportation, waste, and economics, and transformed aspects of their lives, their communities, and wider society. • In the final section, the authors provide a workbook to guide people, wherever they are, through the process of catalyzing change. We all have the power to create a more just and ecological society. We all have the power to be changemakers. From the Preface: "Our world seems beset by crises. For us, climate change is the defining issue of our time—but we know many intelligent people who point to the refugee crisis, war, poverty, human rights atrocities, pollution of all sorts, and the ongoing struggle against totalitarianism as the primary problem we all face. And although this is an exhausting list, it is not an exhaustive one. Even if we don’t feel like we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, it is easy to feel despair in the face of these vast, interlocking problems. We began this book because we were looking for reasons to choose hope over despair. We find these reasons in the stories of transformation and learning that we share here, and in the idea of transformational learning as a way of moving through the crises that surround us. What we have realized is that neither hope nor despair is sufficient, and neither is entirely relevant. Both hope and despair are emotions that are focused on the future rather than the present. The process of building a society that is based on compassion and care for the Earth and all its beings, human and otherwise, is not something that can happen only in the future. It can and must happen now. And, fortunately, for the sake of our collective future well-being, it is happening now. In this book, we explore the stories and experiences of individuals who are living as if the world is changing into that compassionate and caring society and, by so doing, are changing the world.