CHANGE! A Student Guide to Social Action

This is the first practical social change text devoted to students working in an academic environment. While there are many books about community organizing and social change, there are no college texts focusing on how to provide real-world experience with academic content taking into consideration the flow of the academic term. CHANGE! A Student Guide to Social Action is written specifically for faculty and staff to use with college students with the goal of helping students bring about the change they believe is necessary to make our community a better place to live.

Dr. Scott Myers-Lipton is Professor of Sociology at San Jose State University, and is the author of Ending Extreme Inequality: An Economic Bill of Rights Approach to Eliminate Poverty (Paradigm 2015), Rebuild America: Solving the Economic Crisis through Civic Works (Paradigm 2009), and Social Solutions to Poverty: America's Struggle to Build a Just Society (Paradigm 2006), as well as numerous scholarly articles on racism, education, and civic engagement.

He co-founded the successful efforts to raise the minimum wage from $8 to $10 in San Jose and to modernize San Jose’s business tax. He also co-founded the Gulf Coast Civic Works Campaign, an initiative to develop 100,000 prevailing-wage jobs for local and displaced workers after Hurricane Katrina. He has worked to help students develop solutions to poverty by taking them to live at homeless shelters, the Navajo and Lakota nations, the U.S. Gulf Coast, and Kingston, Jamaica. He is also on the Board of Directors for the National Jobs for All Coalition.

Scott Myers-Lipton is the recipient of San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP Social Justice Award, the Elbert Reed Award from the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Santa Clara County, the Changer Maker Award from the Silicon Valley Council of Non-Profits, and the Manuel Vega Latino Empowerment Award. He lives with his wife, Diane, and his two children, Gabriela and Josiah, in San Jose. In addition, Scott and Diane are the proprietors of the Sequoia Retreat Center, a meeting space dedicated to individual and social transformation.