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Woodstock Times - Book Review | 9/17/2009 |
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Be the change
Empowerment leader and author David Gershon offers a blueprint for societal change in his new book |
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by Andrea Barrist Stern
With our planet and its people in peril from such dire problems as global warming, environmental pollution, chronic poverty, disease epidemics, terrorism and ethnic and racial animosity, a new type of paradigm for social change is needed, believes long-time activist and West Hurley resident David Gershon. Efforts to bring about legislative change are no longer adequate or quick enough in such calamitous times, when the planet's very systems are unraveling around us. What is needed, he believes, is a vision that inspires people to realize that "the natural starting point for changing our world for the better is us."
Drawing on three decades of activism in the field of social transformation, Gershon lays out his blueprint for a societal about-face in his new book, Social Change 2.0 (Highpoint/Chelsea Green, $27.95), which he will unveil locally at a book signing from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, September 20 at the Kleinert/James Art Gallery in Woodstock. The event is sponsored by the Golden Notebook.
"The world we are now living in is under tremendous stress...," said Gershon this week by phone, noting that "most change [in our society] is attempted through the passage of laws and providing financial incentives." But this is an old paradigm, one he refers to as "Social change 1.0," and one which, he said, dates back some 250 years to the founding of our country. Today, he pointed out, the problems are larger than ever before and the change that is needed is immediate if we are to "have a healthy planet that can sustain humankind." And, as proven by the situation the planet finds itself in today, the changes that are so necessary are ones that do not respond well to the old way of doing things.
"The heart of Social Change 2.0 as a strategy is empowering people with a vision of possibilities and providing them with the tools to make it happen," he said. "The book basically attempts to help move us from this stuck place where we say to ourselves the problems are so large, or our track record is so poor, how are we going to have a future?"
Gershon said his new empowerment model for societal transformation is not intended to replace the previous legislative paradigm. Laws are necessary in a society, he said. At the same time, however, we are at a critical time in our history when people must be empowered to "lift themselves up," he believes.
Empowerment and social change are subjects Gershon, 62, knows well from first-hand experience and some 30 years in the trenches of social activism. Founder and co-director of the West Hurley-based Empowerment Institute, Gershon has created initiatives to inspire behavior-change and large-system transformation in government agencies, large organizations, communities, and individuals from regular people to leaders and entrepreneurs. The creator and administrator of Global Action Plan (an international not-for-profit organization throughout the 1990s that clustered small groups of people together in "ecoteams" to bring about environmentally sustainable behavioral change at the individual level), Gershon also created a disaster preparedness initiative for New York City in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack and is the author of ten other books, including Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds (Empowerment Institute, 2006), which won the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Award for the book "Most Likely to Save the Planet."
At the height of the Cold War and using the mythic power of a peace torch that was relayed through 62 countries around the world, Gershon involved an estimated 25 million people in the First Earth Run in 1986, an event he organized in partnership with the United Nations children's Fund and ABC Television. Millions of dollars were raised to enable UNICEF to provide care to the neediest children of the world. The accomplishment drew on his earlier experience in 1976 organizing a 50-state, 9,000-mile torch relay to celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial. Gershon has also served as an advisor on empowerment and sustainability issues to the Clinton White House and the United Nations and his initiatives at home and abroad have included those to empower inner city residents in Philadelphia and disenfranchised women in Afghanistan.
Tools for change
In Social Change 2.0, Gershon illustrates how aspirations and passion for change are created using accounts of his own experiences and the principles and lessons he has learned first-hand as a social architect. In each chapter, he discusses the transformative techniques that were used to build on one another's strengths to create results that could not have been achieved individually. Some are straightforward, such as inviting people to participate in social change, connecting people around shared aspirations, and resolving chronic issues by developing a win-win situation. Others are procedural, like creating a regular process time to check in, creating the right size group for the initiative and building the group into a team, structuring meetings to produce tangible outcomes, ways of acknowledging diversity, and the development of communication and feedback protocols. Some creative efforts are intended to allow the synergy within a collaboration of talented people to go exponential, what some have referred to as the "group genius effect." Gershon also discusses how to take a social innovation to scale.
It shouldn't be surprising that, as a child, Gershon absorbed himself in Superman comics. "I still like Superman," he said unapologetically. "This guy had a great aspiration for making the world better. He had a no-limit philosophy and wanted to do good in the world and that inspired me. Any time I see a heroic archetype, it has lifted me. It's what [the late mythologist] Joseph Campbell calls the 'heroic impulse.' I've found it lifts people when you can help them touch that in themselves."
Scientists agree that if our planet as we know it is to survive, change must take place immediately and Gershon sees "a readiness for some serious things to happen." Adds the activist, "What's been missing is some of the how-to."
At the close of the book, he writes, "At the Federal Convention of 1787, after three and a half months of deliberation of a constitution for the new United States, Benjamin Franklin was asked, 'Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?' 'A republic,' replied the doctor, 'if you can keep it.' The same could be said about our planet. Whether we get to keep it as a viable dwelling place for human habitation and evolution is up to us. To do this, we must be able to change the game. Changing the game is not a spectator sport. It requires each of us to play a position on the team, and to play it with all of our heart and soul and mind. It requires nothing less than our very best and highest effort."++
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