A Better World: A great idea fumbled

A Better World Starts Here: Activists and Their Work sounds like a great idea for a book. The author, Stacy Russo, a community college librarian and professor at Santa Ana College, describes herself as a writer, poet, and artist. Her books include Love Activism, We Were Going to Change the World, Life as Activism, and The Library as Place in California.

Her idea: interview 25 activists in different areas about their backgrounds, ask them what set them on their activist path, and describe their organizations (or activism if they have no organization). A receptive reader may be inspired to become active, even to start her/his own organization. It's great idea for a book that could have been much better than it is.

Russo asks one soft-ball, bold-face question after another and apparently transcribes with light editing whatever she was told. These are questions like, "How do you continue to stay positive in your activism?" "Do you have any final thoughts on your work that you would like to share?" "Did you notice any differences with the treatment of women versus men in your field?" (The answer—surprise!—is yes.) The technique means that the interviews all follow a certain pattern and a certain blandness. A 300-page book of transcriptions by its very nature tends to be boring as opposed to a single page Q&A with an author, an expert, or a celebrity in a magazine.

I had another problem with the book: It's sometimes difficult to see how the interviewee is actually making the world better. The first interview is with a "trans activist/certified holistic life coach." This woman says that in 2017 she and a friend formed TranSpectrum, "a social and support group for people who do not identify as cisgender, the gender/sex they are assigned medically at birth, and those who are questioning their gender." But she's no longer leading the group, and I'd like to know what the group actually accomplished (is accomplishing). How does it support? How is it making the world better?

One interviewee is a feminist who had to abandon Orthodox Judaism to become one. But her story implies the world would be better if Orthodox Jewish women renounced Orthodox Judaism for feminism. It might be better for certain women—it apparently was for the woman Russo interviewed—but would it be better in general? It might be possible to make that case, just as it might be possible to make a general case for veganism, caring for elderly dogs, or publishing books like A Better World Starts Here (Russo interviews her publisher), but the book often assume the case need not be made. The goodness is self-evident. A skeptical reader, however, will on occasion want the case made.

The most rewarding interviews are with activists who have started an organization for which a need is apparent. Michelle Carrera began Chilies on Wheels on Thanksgiving, 2014 when she prepared fifteen vegan meals in her New York City apartment and gave them to homeless people on the street. The response was so strong, she realized the need was greater than she thought. "We have expanded to other cities and the amount of meals we have been able to provide keeps growing. Right now, we prepare about 100 to 200 meals each week in New York."

Steve Bell served nearly 17 years of an indeterminate life sentence in the California prison system. He had a BA when he was sentenced but realized in prison that a frightening number of the inmates are illiterate and that led to the Prison Library Project. Once Bell was released and discovered the organization volunteered with it. It has now grown to the point where, "we send out abut 30,000 free books to prisoners every year."

Sara Vander Zanden is now the executive director of Facing Homelessness in Seattle, whose mission is to "invite the community to be part of the solution to homelessness." And while this involves a number of activities, the most extraordinary (to me) is to actually build a small house for a homeless person in the back yard. of a host family (flipping NIBY on its head). "We think that someday it will be just as normal to think about your backyard as a platform for social justice as it is to think about your spare room as a potential income generator through AirBnB."

Inspiring as several of the book's examples are, I'd have preferred fewer and deeper stories. Over and over I wondered, where does the money come from? From grants? From foundations? What foundations? What are the major challenges you have to deal with? If you were starting again, what would you do differently? How do you find board members? Volunteers? How do you measure success? What are your results?

A Better World Starts Here is a great idea that is disappointing because it could have been so much richer, deeper . . . better.