Family Activism
Empowering Your Community, Beginning with Family and Friends
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
We live in a world that needs radical transformation if our children and grandchildren are to live healthy, peace-filled lives. But where to start? In this inspiring new book, activist Roberto Vargas says the answer lies surprisingly close: at home, with our closest relationships.
In our daily lives we experience countless opportunities to empower, inspire, and support positive change in those around us. In Family Activism Vargas explains how fostering what he calls familia—close, loving connections with our relatives and with those we choose to call family—can help us develop the skills and attitudes we need to tackle broader problems in our community, our nation, and the world.
Vargas explains the ideas underlying the familia approach and the techniques that support it using examples from his own life, some of them very emotionally charged. He does more than just describe practices like the family council, unity circles, and family ceremonies—he shares how they transformed him as a husband, father, son, brother, friend, and as a committed community activist. Each chapter ends with a series of questions that will help readers understand these practices more deeply and apply them inside and outside of the family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vargas, a longtime corporate and community consultant, approaches social activism with high ideals, a positive viewpoint and, most helpfully, a practical and gratifying plan of action, based in his personal experience and cultural heritage. The "Familia Approach" treats activism not as a solo enterprise but as "a way of living so as to teach love and activate the positive power of our families and communities." Vargas unpacks the Mexican idea of familia and finds enfolded within its notion of the extended family-"everyone you care for and who cares for you"-the American passion for social activism. Each chapter expands on this idea, including reflection questions and bullet-point "practices," with much insight into Vargas's own family and Latino culture in general (both modern and ancient). Though not religious, Vargas is "spiritual," and does consider prayer and indigenous religious practices (like unity circles) important and powerful. Equally important, however, is real human understanding, for which he introduces the surprisingly complex concept of conocimento-conversation meant to deepen participants' knowledge of each other. Vargas's text, full of new agisms like "transformation," "energy" and "synergy," will strike some readers as redundant, but those ready to share in Vargas's passion will find much to learn.
