We Need to Build

<b><b>From the former faith adviser to President Obama comes an inspirational guide for those who seek to promote positive social change and build a more diverse and just democracy</b></b><br><br>The goal of social change work is not a more ferocious revolution; it is a more beautiful social order. It is harder to organize a fair trial than it is to fire up a crowd more challenging to build a good school than it is to tell others they are doing education all wrong. But every decent society requires fair trials and good schools and that&#146;s just the beginning of the list of institutions and structures that need to be efficiently created and effectively run in large-scale diverse democracy. <br> <br>&#160;<br><i>We Need to Build</i> is a call to create those institutions and a guide for how to run them well.<br> &#160;<br> In his youth Eboo Patel was inspired by love-based activists like John Lewis Martin Luther King Jr. Badshah Khan Mahatma Gandhi Mother Teresa Dorothy Day Abraham Joshua Heschel and Thich Nhat Hanh. Their example and a timely challenge to build the change he wanted to see led to a life engaged in the particulars of building nourishing and sustaining an institution that seeks to promote positive social change&#151;Interfaith America. Now drawing on his twenty years of experience Patel tells the stories of what he&#146;s learned and how in the process he came to construct as much as critique and collaborate more than oppose.<br> &#160;<br> His challenge to us is clear: those of us committed to refounding America as a just and inclusive democracy need to defeat the things we don&#146;t like by building the things we do.