Booklife Review

Urging citizens to awaken to their power, this “radically revised” and updated edition of Daley-Harris’s rousing guide to “transformational advocacy” (first published in 1994) offers practical guidance to the good work of changemaking, plus inspiring first-hand accounts of advocacy in action, a flexible framework for action adaptable to any cause, and much buoyant, hard-to-resist coaching. Drawing on his experience with the anti-poverty citizens’ lobby RESULTS, which he founded, plus coaching a host of other advocacy groups, including the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, Daley-Harris faces head on contemporary cynicism about the impossibility of making a difference, especially the misconceptions that our “civic paralysis” can’t be broken or that transformational advocacy—in which grassroots volunteers “are trained, encouraged, and then succeed” at making change, right up to meeting with officials and winning press coverage—is “too hard or too frustrating, too complicated, or too partisan, too dirty or too time-consuming, too ineffective or too costly.”

Daley-Harris is clear-eyed about the challenges that make change difficult, acknowledging that he’s “not immune to the despair and frustration” about the difficulty of finding “common cause” in the “post-Trump era.” But he’s impassioned and persuasive in his advocacy of advocacy itself, and his brisk case studies prove heartening: RESULTS’s actions saving the International Fund for Agricultural Development during the Reagan era; CCL’s booming growth into a national lobby with extraordinary outreach capabilities.

Daley-Harris urges “citizen advocates” to “lead with vulnerability and authenticity” and to move beyond social media when striving to make change. At the same time, he calls for non-profits to empower the grassroots. He laments how so many people feel little connection to their government, and champions “the exhilaration” of making a difference. Then, writing with the clarity and enthusiasm of a coach, he offers updated but classic steps toward actually doing so: how to approach a meeting with officials and maybe land them on a cause’s “champion scale”; how media outlets actually work; why “partnership” beats “partisanship” when building a movement; and much more.

Takeaway: Rousing guide to advocacy, movement-building, and enacting change in cynical times.

Comparable Titles:Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Now, Leslie R. Crutchfield’s How Change Happens.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A