Making Policy, Making Change: How Communities Are Taking Law into Their Own Hands

Throughout the country, activists are making change and getting it in writing. Read how community groups have successfully developed and promoted more than 1,000 local policies that have:

• limited alcohol and tobacco billboards and liquor stores in low-income communities
• won higher wages and more rights for workers under public contract
• held corporations accountable for environmental damage
• brought youth into the policy-setting process

By using case studies that focus on community organizing campaigns that created local policy, Themba provides an invaluable guidebook for activists. Written for social activists, community organizers, and students of social and public policy, she offers cogent and clear insights into how these successes can be translated to other social justice organizing.

Makani N. Themba, a longtime community organizer, has worked extensively in the area of media and social change, including stints as Media Director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference/Los Angeles and Director of the Center for Media & Policy Analysis of the Marin Institute. She has trained hundreds of community coalitions on effective media and policy advocacy. Themba currently directs the Applied Research Center’s Grassroots Innovative Policy Program (GRIPP).