Effecting Change
How Change Happens
+ How You Can Start to Make a Positive
Difference in the World Today!
This guide is provided to help anyone begin to understand:
- how social, political, and other major changes happen within our society
- peaceful, practical, prudent, and productive means to inspire and lead to change
This guide is intentionally neutral, favoring no particular ideological persuasion.
While notions for change often find their origin in very specific feelings or reactions to certain ideas or situations, most of the "good change" really comes down to information -
good information - not merely "sound bytes" or political talking points but
facts which can be confirmed, acknowledged, independently studied and questioned, and used as a foundation for any notion of improving ourselves and our community.
Strong
critical thinking skills are absolutely necessary if you are to undertake any cause for change. In learning how to evaluate information - particularly claims and sources of information - you can strengthen your cause, proceeding with diligence, validity, and powerful purpose.
And, while public libraries are generally neutral in their mission to serve everyone, offering complete access to the full spectrum of ideas, public libraries are, in fact, advocates of democracy through free access to information: they can and should be used to gain new knowledge, which can then lead to greater understanding, more informed decisions, and heightened mindfulness of how things work and, perhaps more importantly, how things could be improved, personally and socially, through free and self-empowering access to information.
Only once we begin to understand our world - where we have been and what has been fought for, in terms of rights and freedoms and why - can we truly begin to contemplate social change, learning some crucial concepts and history so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past while achieving awareness essential to any realistic hopes for a better future, for ourselves and for others.
With that in mind, we invite you to explore this guide to learn about such things as...
- Civics - the duties, rights, and freedoms of citizens, their relationship with the government, and how government generally works in a democracy
- Terminology - important words you should familiarize yourself with so you can more actively and intelligently participate in discussions, debates, and propositions of change
- History - rights movements, historic documents which have helped define our nation, our democracy, our society, and present reality
- Elections - how elections and voting work, how to support candidates you believe can help bring about the change you prefer, and the prospect of running for political office
- Taking Action - how lobbying works, and how you can begin to lobby for changes, through such things as letters to editors, petitions, contacting government representatives directly to ask questions, promote ideas, and voice your concerns, and how you might begin to exercise your Constitutional freedoms of speech and assembly to highlight and address concerns and advocate change in a peaceful yet prominent public manner
