Richard L. Wood

At a time when participation in democratic governance exhibits a decrease among the less well-off and an increase of power among the elite, one big question concerns how to reverse this trend. Wood and Fulton have devoted this book to finding ways to build democratic participation by low-income and working families, and to create cross-racial alliances. Here s where faith-based organizations enter the picture. These organizations have been significant players in shaping health-care reform, financial reform, and immigration reform at higher levels of government, aimed at benefitting working families. It is a movement which directly addresses economic inequality, policy paralysis, and racial injustice in the United States. Faith-based organizing, the authors show, offers important lessons for an American public struggling to combine universalist democratic ideals with an increasingly multicultural reality in what will soon be a thoroughly multicultural society, as new immigrant arrivals and demographic diffusion spread diversity into settings that were once bastions of white subculture. Models for community organizing have been supplied over time by Saul Alinsky, Cesar Chavez, and Martin Luther King, Jr. "A Shared Future" has a distinctly empirical focus on one of the most important sponsoring networks for faith-based organizations: PICO (Pacific Institute for Community Organizations), which shifted neighborhood-based organizations to congregation-based organizations. They achieved a high profile during the formation of health care policy that found its way into Obamacare legislation, and have also been an important agent for addressing racial equity. Wood and Fulton here address a new generation of faith-based community organizers, seeking to ground the movement in what they call ethical democracy, and fleshing out an approach to addressing economic inequality and political paralysis."