How to Organize Your Block: Simple Steps to Create Real Change in Your Community

Your neighborhood is not broken. It is unorganized.

There is a system for change. You are holding it.

How to Organize Your Block: Simple Steps to Create Real Change in Your Community is a practical, no-excuse guide for anyone who has ever looked at their block and known that something had to be done. Written by community and labor organizer Monica Sekhmet Grant, PhD, this book breaks down the organizing process into clear, repeatable steps that anyone can learn, teach, and use immediately.

You will learn how to identify the right issue to organize around, how to talk to your neighbors and actually get them to show up, how to run a meeting that ends with a plan instead of just a conversation, how to research your target and apply strategic pressure, and how to build momentum that lasts beyond the first rally.

This is not theory. This is the system that organizers use to move people from frustration to action, from conversation to power.

First published in 2015 and now in its 3rd Edition, this book includes a new foreword by Dr. Monica Grant reflecting on a decade of applying these same principles to build businesses, launch community experiences, and create impact in Tampa, Florida. The organizing framework she teaches in these pages is the same one she has been running her own life and enterprises on ever since.

Inside you will also find ready-to-use worksheets including a Neighbor Information Form, Community Issues Form, Target Research guide, Meeting Agenda, Community Sign-Up Sheet, and Confirmation Call List, so you can start organizing the moment you finish reading.

This book is for the person who is done waiting for someone else to fix it.

Whether you want to stop crime on your block, boycott a business that does not hire locally, push out a corrupt politician, or simply bring your neighbors together around something that matters, this book gives you the blueprint.

Power is not given. It is organized.