We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy-Fast Shipping

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“You don’t create societies by burning things down, You create societies by building things.”

From the former faith adviser to President Obama comes a fresh manifesto for those who seek to promote positive change and build a more diverse and just democracy

Thegoal of social change work is not a more ferocious revolution; it is a morebeautiful social order. It is harder to organize a fair trial than it is tofire up a crowd, more challenging to build a good school than it is to tellothers they are doing education all wrong. But every decent society requiresfair trials and good schools, and that’s just the beginning of the list ofinstitutions and structures that need to be efficiently created andeffectively run in large-scale diverse democracy.

We Need to Build is a call to create those institutionsand a guide for how to run them well.

In his youth, Eboo Patel was inspired by love-based activists like JohnLewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Badshah Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa,Dorothy Day, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Their example, anda timely challenge to build the change he wanted to see, led to a lifeengaged in the particulars of building, nourishing, and sustaining aninstitution that seeks to promote positive social change—Interfaith , drawing on his twenty years of experience, Patel tells the stories ofwhat he’s learned and how, in the process, he came to construct as much ascritique and collaborate more than oppose.

His challenge to us is clear: those of us committed to refounding Americaas a just and inclusive democracy need to defeat the things we don’t like bybuilding the things we do.