Book Circles
In April of 2023, the Book Circle read Shawn A. Ginwright's The Four Pivots, Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves.
From Dr. Ginwright's web page:
“Reading this courageous book feels like the beginning of a social and personal awakening…I can’t stop thinking about it.”—Brené Brown, PhD, author of Atlas of the Heart
For readers of Emergent Strategy and Dare to Lead, an activist’s roadmap to long-term social justice impact through four simple shifts.
We need a fundamental shift in our values–a pivot in how we think, act, work, and connect. Despite what we’ve been told, the most critical mainspring of social change isn’t coalition building or problem analysis. It’s healing: deep, whole, and systemic, inside and out.
Here, Shawn Ginwright, PhD, breaks down the common myths of social movements–a set of deeply ingrained beliefs that actually hold us back from healing and achieving sustainable systemic change. He shows us why these frames don’t work, proposing instead four revolutionary pivots for better activism and collective leadership:
Awareness: from lens to mirror
Connection: from transactional to transformative relationships
Vision: from problem-fixing to possibility-creating
Presence: from hustle to flow
Supplemented with reflections, prompts, cutting-edge research, and the author’s own insights and lived experience as an African American social scientist, professor, and movement builder, The Four Pivots helps us uncover our obstruction points. It shows us how to discover new lenses and boldly assert our need for connection, transformation, trust, wholeness, and healing. It gives us permission to create a better future–to acknowledge that a broken system has been predefining our dreams and limiting what we allow ourselves to imagine, but that it doesn’t have to be that way at all. Are you ready to pivot?
ISBN: Paperback 9781623175429 | Ebook 9781623175436 | Audiobook 9781623177782 " Edition Description: 1st *
Publisher: North Atlantic Books (Published: January 25, 2022), Berkeley, CA (Huichin, unceded Ohlone land)
During much of 2022, a CTTT member volunteered to present a chapter from The Little Book of Racial Healing. This book is available NOW from the Good Books imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, this new addition to the Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding series presents the Coming to the Table Approach to racial healing in book form for the first time. PLEASE NOTE: 100% of author proceeds from this Little Book are donated to Coming to the Table to support the racial healing work described within its pages.
Coming to the Table (CTTT) was born in 2006 when two dozen descendants from both sides of the system of enslavement gathered together in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, in collaboration with the Center for Justice & Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. Participants envisioned a more connected and truthful world that would address the unresolved and persistent effects of the historic institution of slavery. This Little Book describes the Coming to the Table Approach to racial healing; a continuously evolving set of purposeful theories, ideas, experiments, guidelines, and intentions, all dedicated to facilitating racial healing and transformation. The CTTT Approach includes principles of Restorative Justice, Trauma Awareness, use of the Circle Process in group dialogue, and four interrelated pillars: Uncover History, Make Connections, Work Toward Healing, and Take Action. The CTTT Approach, and this Little Book, are committed to a vision of a just and truthful society that acknowledges and seeks to heal from the racial wounds of the past – from slavery and the many forms of racism it spawned.