Starting Somewhere: Community Organizing for Socially Awkward People Who've Had Enough

By Roderick Douglass

Starting Somewhere: Community Organizing for Socially Awkward People Who've Had Enough offers readers a crash course in organizing, educating, and agitating in the 21st Century. Written with a mix of incriminating anecdotes, personal retellings, and historical examples, Starting Somewhere is a first-person look at radical community organizing for misfits and outcasts committed to saving this planet for some inexplicable reason. Approx. 200 pages.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DPJKY456
• ISBN13: 9798991846806
• Release Date: January 2025
• Publisher: Truth Is Publishing
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Hilariously wry, wise, and impossible to put down.

This book is excellent for beginner and seasoned organizers, and those who are simply interested in social change. It offers a treasure trove of useful how-to guides for safer, strategic organizing nestled between humorous and sometimes very poignant personal anecdotes that are written with unflinching honesty and wit. I read it in two sittings, and if I'd not needed to interrupt the first, I know I'd have gotten it all in one. This book not only offered me tools for my activism, it left me feeling incredibly seen as someone who engages in social change due to a lifetime of poverty, trauma, and neurodivergent spiciness that won't let me let an injustice go. Douglass writes with such a conversational tone you almost miss the fact that you're being richly educated through his references, suggested tools, and related personal stories. This is by far one of the best instructional texts I've ever read on the subject of organizing and activism, and I'm not sure I own another book I've marked up as much, lol. I'm so grateful to have this in my library. I cannot wait to share it with and recommend it to others. If there were any criticism to give it, it would only be that as a nonbinary person I found his last chapter on dealing with the problem of patriarchal violence a wee bit exclusionary in its gendered language, but the rest of the book is so brilliant that it didn't turn me off, it just came across as something he simply didn't clock as someone who isn't nonbinary and is existing in a world that is woefully binary in its perception of gender. Best book I've read in probably two years... <3