Our Beautiful Next - (Emergent Strategy) by Makani Themba (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The real battleground for social change is our collective imagination--and the world we seek is closer than we think.

What does it take to build a world rooted in collective joy and thriving--and why, when we have the knowledge and expertise to feed people, house people, and heal people, don't we? Makani Themba's answer begins with power: how it works, how it shapes what we believe is possible, and how controlling our imagination is the primary tool of those who benefit from things staying the same.

Our Beautiful Next is an invitation to step into our full power as changemakers and deepen our understanding of how change actually happens. Drawing on ancestral wisdom, personal narratives, poetry, practical tools, and science, Themba challenges long-held notions about transformative change--what it looks like, what it requires of us, and what it means to build the kind of power that makes it possible.

Part of the Emergent Strategy Series, with a foreword by series editor adrienne maree brown.

About the Author

Makani Themba is a mama, Black nerd, funkateer, and life-long organizer who believes deeply in the brilliance of community. Her talks and writings help inspire generations of changemakers to embrace new ways of seeing, being, and working in the world. Themba's previous book include Making Policy Making Change: How Communities Are Taking Law into Their Own Hands and Talking the Walk: A Communications Guide for Racial Justice.

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her collaborations, and her podcasts. Informed by twenty-five years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E. Butler scholarship, and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured emergent strategy, pleasure activism, radical imagination, and transformative justice as ideas and practices for change. Some of her books include Emergent Strategy, the New York Times-bestseller Pleasure Activism, We Will Not Cancel Us, Loving Corrections, and her novels, Grievers, Maroons, and Ancestors.