This little guidebook will be an excellent read for you if you are interested in any of the following: community organizing, building a healthier sustainable human society, democratic social movements, popular education, and/or applying principles of social change theory. Think of this as a very practical "how-to" manual for a successful workshop model that is well-grounded in a philosophy of social change.

I want to make this as simple as possible.   I know you are the smartest people in the world.    If you were not the smartest people in the world you would not be here.  But I do not want to make you prove you are smart.   I do not want to ask you to figure out something complicated.  

I will give short answers to four simple questions:

1. Who are we?
2. Where are we going?
3. How will we get there?
4. What are some next steps?

Here are the short answers:

Having written at great length on these topics,  I have tried to condense some main points into a few words, hoping to attract the attention of the majority with only a few minutes to read,   The topic is nothing less than how to save humanity and the biosphere.  "The economy" refers indifferently to national economies, regional economies, and the global economy.   The premise of this indifference is, as Charles Taylor would say, that the constitutive rules are the same in all three cases.

This video dialogue between Howard Richards, philosopher of social science, and Evelin Lindner, was created on 30th April 2012 in Chile, in Howard's Dialogue Home and Centro para el Desarrollo Alternativo in Limache, Chile.

In this video, Howard Richards explains the connections between what is possible to do in daily life and what is necessary to do for justice and sustainability. The video was recorded by Shelley Damaris Richards Higgins:

The fundamental problems underlying the present crisis require for their solution the amendment of cultural structures that became dominant in early modernity when the modern world-system was constituted first in Europe and then worldwide.   World leaders and  the economists who advise them are now debating whether more stimulus or more austerity, or some combination of the two,  is the path toward restoring the normal functioning of capitalist accumulation, and therefore toward higher levels of employment and economic growth.