This second edition examines new strategies, tactics, issues, and grassroots campaigns, and revisits whether activists have learned from past mistakes.
When I wrote the original version of The Activist's Handbook in the early 1990s, activists faced a very different social landscape. Online activism and social media were still in the future, and the potential of email and the Internet to boost activist campaigns was untapped. Americans got their news solely from television, radio, and daily newspapers. Campaigns for marriage equality were off the political radar, and a powerful national immigrant rights movement did not exist. We heard little about growing inequality between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, and few imagined the election of the nation's first African American president in 2008. These and other changes in the past two decades require a completely new version of the original book. This second edition examines new strategies, tactics, issues, and grassroots campaigns, and revisits whether activists have learned from past mistakes. It allows me to describe how activists should harness social media and other new tools to achieve their goals, and how new media can be best connected to traditional organizing and old media strategies. Student activism, at a low point when the original book came out and little mentioned, has since surged and is now the subject of an entirely new chapter. I have expanded my discussion of direct action activism to include additional campaigns and groups, and I explain why greater innovation is needed in response to opposition tactics. Since the original book, activists have become far more engaged in electoral politics, and the new book enables me to discuss how new media tools have enabled activists to increase assistance to progressive campaigns nationwide.
Hunter S.
The Global Coalition for Tech Justice is a newly formed global movement to ensure Big Tech plays its role in protecting elections and citizens’ rights and freedoms across the world, particularly in the global majority where companies – Meta/Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter, TikTok et al – have been negligent in dealing with the impacts of their social media and messaging products.
Capture customer and employee feedback in the moment to drive positive change throughout your organization.
Tools to build a movement
Cities and towns across Massachusetts and few in other states have adopted Visual Budget, either the new WordPress plug-in or the original.
On May 1, 2025 (Law Day), lawyers across the country are encouraged to participate in #ReaffirmTheOath—a nonpartisan, nonpolitical national grassroots effort empowering lawyers in communities large and small to speak out, stand together, and publicly renew their commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law.