Breakthrough Community Change: A Guide to Creating Common Agendas That Change Everything

Paul Born

Apr 2023 · Berrett-Koehler Audio · Narrated by Jeff Hoyt

About this audiobook

Discover a powerful methodology for bringing communities together to uncover hidden assets and transform deep-rooted challenges.

Veteran community organizer Paul Born's work has contributed to lowering cancer rates in Maine, improving mental health for young people in Florida, and reducing poverty rates in Canada by 20 percent. In this much-needed new book, he shares stories of how he was able to catalyze local communities and guide them to make significant progress on seemingly intractable community problems.

Born has found that the secret to success is to organize and unite around a common agenda. This is not a list of topics, like a meeting agenda, nor a strategic plan. He offers a process for bringing leaders from businesses, human service organizations, and governments together with people who have a lived experience of a specific community problem. A common agenda is a statement of shared aspirations, a map of the assets in the community, and a road map for how to work together to make those aspirations a reality.

Part I of this book describes how to identify your community's readiness for change; form leadership, action, and strategy teams; create a common agenda; and establish plans for community engagement. Part II presents the approaches and skill sets needed to do the work described in part I.

Remarkably, enormous systemic problems such as climate change, poverty, disease, racism, housing, and many more issues can be best addressed at the local level. Communities can develop solutions tailored to their unique circumstances and can collaborate at a magnitude that can result in a truly transformative impact. This book shows how to make change happen.

About the author

Paul Born is the cofounder and former CEO and co-CEO at Tamarack Institute, a leading authority on the ideas and practice of community engagement, collective impact, and community innovation. He is also the founder and past CEO of Vibrant Communities, now active in over 500 municipalities with campaigns to end poverty, deepen community, build youth futures, and tackle climate change. In 2019 Born was appointed as a member of the Order of Canada; he is also a senior fellow at Ashoka, the world's largest network of social innovators. He is the author of five books.