A Community Builder who Never Quits
Grace Lee Boggs puts things in perspective quite nicely in this interview with Bill Moyers. It’s all about building community and empowering people to take control of their own own lives, instead of looking to some leader somewhere to provide for them. Real change — change for the good, anyway — starts down at the grassroots and forces movement above. Not the other way around. And when economic and governmental structures break down, that’s no reason to give up and complain and get distracted, it’s simply a reason to rebuild and focus on self sufficiency and distributing power so it can be used to actually help people. That is how some people feel in Detroit. They are acting. They are building. They aren’t giving up and leaving others behind. And at least one of those community builders is 93. Ninety three. Feeling down? Call Grace. She knows no other way.
[...] leaders. The only way this ends well is if we stop following others and start doing for ourselves. See Grace Lee Boggs on that last point. Other than that, we have the best leadership money can [...]
Leadership Lacking « Jim Grisanzio
April 11, 2010 at 10:37 pm
[...] Build to distribute power so everyone is a leader and everyone is a follower and everyone benefits. See Grace Lee Boggs on that last point. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Building Communities by Building SchoolsThe Art [...]
Some Votes Count More than Others « Jim Grisanzio
April 19, 2010 at 1:02 pm
[...] of time. The visible leaders wouldn’t even be possible without everyone else doing the work (those are the real leaders, actually). Or organize to pressure politicians to implement various policies, if you are so inclined, but [...]
Activists Driving Marketing Campaigns | Jim Grisanzio
November 29, 2010 at 4:52 pm
[...] The juxtaposition of these concepts is not new. Martin Luther King preached about it 40 years ago during the American invasion of Vietnam (and obviously many others before him). Boggs and Kurashige cite King’s Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence speech (my personal favorite) in their article above as they point to their work in Detroit. It will be fascinating to read further about how Boggs and her team of inner-city community builders have been applying King’s lessons as they rebuild Detroit, a city victimized by decades of neglect and de-industrialization. [...]
Asserting the Positive and Building the Solution Yourself « Jim Grisanzio
January 30, 2011 at 9:08 pm