The Barefoot Guide to Working with Organisations and Social Change : Tools and Lessons

This manual will be useful to anyone interested in fostering healthy human organzation in any sphere of life. In this book the authors offer a perspective on why organizations exist, the real roles they play, and on the importance of supporting the sovereignty of local organizations and social movements for meaningful social change.

This is a practical, do-it-yourself guide for leaders and facilitators wanting to help organisations to function and to develop in more healthy, human and effective ways as they strive to make their contributions to a more humane society. It has been developed by the Barefoot Collective.The guide, with its supporting website, includes tried and tested concepts, approaches, stories and activities. Its purpose is to help stimulate and enrich the practice of anyone supporting organisations and social movements in their challenges of working, learning, growing and changing to meet the needs of our complex world. Although it is aimed at leaders and facilitators of civil society organisations, it will be useful to anyone interested in fostering healthy human organisation in any sphere of life.This book offers a perspective on why organisations exist, the real roles they play, and on the importance of supporting the sovereignty of local organisations and social movements for meaningful social change. Readers will find a range of approaches to leadership and facilitating change in organisations. In addition, the significance of relationships and power dynamics in organisations and organisational change processes are explored. The guide provides some tools for reading organisations, including how organisations tend to move through various phases of development, for facilitating change and addressing challenges in implementing or sustaining change. Finally, the guide gives support to processes of building learning organisations, how to continually learn both from personal experiences and the experiences of others.A library of additional downloadable exercises, readings, case studies and diagrams to accompany the guide is available on the Barefoot website (www.barefootguide.org).