Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Futures

by Daniel C. Taylor, Carl E. Taylor

How can public health workers, policy experts, and medical professionals work with members of developing nations to promote social change in rapid, cost-effective, and locally appropriate ways? In Just and Lasting Change, Daniel C. and Carl E. Taylor present readers with an innovative, proven, and site-specific guide to helping communities thrive through growing their own change in partnership with experts, donors, and government.

The Taylors built their decades-long careers by partnering with key thinkers to combat inequity, environmental degradation, and globalization. The SEED-SCALE model they describe enables people (wherever they might live) to transform their communities by analyzing their local context in relation to the global, taking appropriate actions based on their priorities and resources, and assessing what succeeding actions may be needed to continue making progress.

Just and Lasting Change describes, step by step, how the SEED-SCALE model can be effectively implemented. Drawing from a variety of engaging personal experiences and case studies, this wide-ranging book describes early attempts to promote social development a century ago, as well as current efforts in South America, Africa, and Asia. It also reveals how community-based social change unfolded in America, spurred at different points by Abraham Lincoln's leadership style and the Green Bay Packers's ownership model, and presents readers with thematic global examples from the anti-smoking campaign, Green Revolution, Child Survival Revolution, and urban agriculture.

The second edition of this pathbreaking handbook offers a hopeful description of how people have improved the quality of life in diverse communities around the world and is fully revised and updated with
Five completely new chapters
Thirteen years of scholarship and global evidence
Contributions from leading international experts in community-based development and public health

424 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2016

Reviews

[Gary Gunderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hope with muscles

Brilliant and gritty. Points the way for the people instead Of sycophants and takers. Tested all around the world with hard data from the hardest places.

[Pradeep Narayanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading it, primarily because it's very grounded; as Robert says, don't start from theory and then see that in practice, rather evolve from the ground. The acronym SEED-SCALE is also appropriate. I can relate easily to examples from India; the rest are interesting to read about. I don't know why this hasn't become a textbook for students. Examples from different voices make it very useful.

I'm wedded to participation from a power analysis point of view, and the power difference starts at the lower level of within community. There's a pattern of whoever is dominant at various levels 'participating' in building nexus at each level. So, I think the next edition of this book could go back to these examples and see the change from the lens of power shift owing to participation. Building from hard data on what was seeded and scaled would show how this created a counter-power struggle. Information on how they were engaged would be very useful.