The Citizen Solution should be on every activist's book shelf -- consider it the practical progressive's Bible for making things happen. Really happen. As author Harry Boyte, senior fellow ast the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, says at one point, this is the kind of guidebook for people who work in the "world as it is" instead of "the world as it should be."
Based on a couple of decades' worth of organizing experience in the real-life experimental laboratory of Minnesota, a state long known as the incubator and trendsetter for innovative progressive policy, author Boyte draws both on his education learning at the feet of the inimitable Saul Alinsky, and the day-to-day lessons he's learned ... often about about learning from the constituencies he came to organize.
Running throughout the book is a basic trust in the local solution and a constant push for an expansion of just who should be involved in the mechanics of every-day democracy. This folk trust shows what modern populism can look like, stripped down and rebuilt differently in every community, according to regional issues and needs. Bursting with case histories and detailed interviews with organizers who've learned how to tread the line between idealism and pragmatism, incrementalism and impulsive change, this book outlines everything from how to run a neighborhood meeting on your street to how to find people in the overlooked "free spaces" that abound in any community ... if you know where to look for them.
