start here
Let This Radicalize You — Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba
If the state of the world has you feeling angry, scared, burned out or completely overwhelmed, start here. This book is about how people stay in the work without pretending everything is fine, and how we turn fear and frustration into relationships, strategy and collective action.
How We Show Up — Mia Birdsong
A beautiful book about why we need each other. Birdsong looks at friendship, chosen family, community and interdependence, and asks what our lives could look like if we stopped treating independence as the goal.
Emergent Strategy — adrienne maree brown
A book about how change actually happens: through relationships, adaptation, experimentation and lots of small choices that add up. It’s especially helpful if you want to think about movements as living communities instead of machines with perfect plans.
Mutual Aid — Dean Spade
A short, very readable introduction to mutual aid: people meeting each other’s needs while also building relationships and power. It explains why mutual aid is different from charity, and how helping people survive can become part of changing the conditions that made survival so hard in the first place.
Learning to be in community
Loving Corrections — adrienne maree brown
How do we tell each other the truth without treating every mistake like a reason to throw someone away? This book is about accountability, belonging, conflict and learning how to stay in relationship while we grow.
The Art of Gathering — Priya Parker
A practical book about making gatherings actually matter. Useful for everything from neighborhood dinners to organizing meetings, especially if you want people to leave feeling more connected than when they arrived.
The Art of Fighting — Priya Parker
Conflict is part of every real relationship and every real group. This book looks at how to disagree more productively and how to recognize the difference between conflict that destroys connection and conflict that helps us get somewhere new.
Mutual aid, care and interdependence
Care Work — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
A powerful introduction to disability justice, collective care and what it means to build communities where people are not disposable. It is full of stories and ideas about creating systems of care outside institutions that often fail people.
Pleasure Activism — adrienne maree brown
Movements cannot survive on guilt, exhaustion and sacrifice alone. This book asks what changes when pleasure, joy, connection and desire become part of how we imagine liberation.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief
A large collection of practical guides about mutual aid, disaster response, community care, direct action and building local systems of support. Good for the moment when you’re ready to move from theory to “okay, how do people actually do this?”
One Million Experiments
A project documenting real-world experiments in community safety, mutual aid and collective care. Great if you want concrete examples of people trying alternatives right now instead of waiting for someone to invent the perfect solution.
How organizing actually works
Practicing New Worlds — Andrea Ritchie
A practical and hopeful look at how people can practice the values they want to see in the world while they organize to change it. It connects abolition, emergent strategy, relationships and real-world movement work.
Beautiful Trouble: Organizing 101
A beginner-friendly collection of organizing ideas and tools. It covers things like welcoming new people, building leadership, keeping people involved and figuring out how to turn values into action.
Training for Change
A library of practical exercises and training tools for meetings, facilitation, strategy, team building and organizing. Especially useful once you suddenly find yourself responsible for helping a group of people make a decision together.
Social Change Ecosystem Map — Deepa Iyer
A simple tool for figuring out what role you might play in social change. You do not have to be the loudest person, the person with the megaphone or the person running the meeting. Movements need many different kinds of people.
Conflict, accountability and not throwing each other away
Fumbling Towards Repair — Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan
A hands-on workbook about what accountability can look like when someone causes harm. It does not promise perfect answers. Instead, it helps people think through repair, responsibility and how communities can respond without automatically reaching for punishment.
Beyond Survival — Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Stories and strategies from people building community-based responses to violence and harm. A good next step if you’re curious about transformative justice but want to see what it can look like in real life.
We Will Not Cancel Us — adrienne maree brown
A short, accessible book about call-outs, conflict, accountability and our tendency to treat people as disposable. Helpful for anyone who has watched a group fall apart over how it handles mistakes.
Building Accountable Communities
A series of short videos about accountability, transformative justice and community responses to harm. A great place to start if you want to understand these ideas without committing to a whole book.
Interrupting Criminalization
A movement resource hub with guides, political education and toolkits about abolition, policing, community safety and transformative justice.
Abolitionist Futures Reading Lists
Curated introductions to abolition through articles, videos, podcasts and books. Helpful if “abolition” still feels like a huge or intimidating concept and you want somewhere approachable to begin.
Bodies, burnout and staying in the work
Liberated to the Bone — Susan Raffo
A book about how trauma, history, relationships and political conditions live in our bodies. It asks what collective healing can look like and how we might build movements that do not reproduce the same harm and exhaustion we are trying to escape.
The Politics of Trauma — Staci Haines
A thoughtful introduction to the connection between personal healing, relationships and social change. Especially useful if you are interested in somatics or wondering why organizing can bring up so much fear, conflict and old survival patterns.
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