Customer Reviews

The Future Is Ours: A Handbook for Student Activists in the 21st Century

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The book is great. I've been involved in a lot of community service activism projects, in the South and the Northeast. I started getting involved in high school and currently I am a doctoral student who is still learning and making a difference. If you've done similar stuff, you know we all learn a lot and improve with experience -- and when we get started, we all have A LOT to learn. Even after all I've done, I found The Future Is Ours really helpful. The amount of detail that the book goes into, and the worksheets, help you keep organized when you're in the middle of everything -- it's all the stuff I didn't realize I didn't know yet, down on paper and ready to use. The chapters I've read and used have made me a lot better at organizing and working with people. It's something you should read when you're getting started and keep on the shelf for the other times you'll need to thumb through for ideas. I wish I'd had it back in high school.

Praise for THE FUTURE IS OURS:

"A wonderfully and sensibly useful book, full of information for all those hungry, thirsty idealists who search for help in figuring out how to move from thought to action."-Robert Coles

"In THE FUTURE IS OURS, John Bartlett has created a guidebook essential to any young activist planning to make ripples in the world. Whether she is volunteering for the first time with a human rights group, starting her own recycling initiative, founding an AIDS awareness campaign or running for public office in her home town, the committed idealist will need this book in her back pocket. Combining practical information with the voices of successful young activists in the field, Bartlett provides both advice and concrete examples of what works. Hunter Schofield's road map to navigating local government, for example, or NARAL/NY program director Stephanie Creaturo's suggestions on starting after-school pregnancy prevention programs in uncooperative school districts give readers a vivid impression of life in the trenches. Armored with these accounts and Bartlett's extensive step-by-step guide to getting started, young people who want to make a difference will enter the next century equipped to transform their communities."-Chloe Breyer, co-founder, Who Cares?

"THE FUTURE IS OURS is inspirational, empowering, and eminently practical. Our generation faces some big problems, but tools like this book are tremendous allies for anyone who wants to work for positive change. Thank you, John Bartlett. You have inspired me more than you will ever know."-Ocean Robbins, 22-year-old founder of Youth for Environmental Sanity, co-author of CHOICES FOR OUR FUTURE

What I like best about The Future Is Ours is that it doesn't make assumptions about what you believe in and what you want to do in your community. Bartlett provides start-to-finish guidelines for organizing a project and creating a movement whether you're focused on environmental issues, human rights, peace, prejudice, or Howard Dean! This makes the issue-specific chapters in part two even more useful, because you've already been given the skills and those chapters give you the direction and a lot of useful information to get started.

Even though the book was published several years ago, all these chapters are still totally relevant and useful (except maybe the chapter on using the Internet to organize). I also really like the "Success Stories" in the book that tell what other students around the world have done, and the inspiring "Words of Wisdom" from people like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Al Gore, Rachel Carson, and others.

The Future Is Ours really is what it says -- "a handbook for student activists in the 21st century." I hope a lot of people use it.

Another how-to resource manual where the author makes a profit by just assembling a bunch of essays by fellow self-promoting young activists. Too much on environmental activism, ignoring two grim realities: how the heck youth activism can ever defeat the DC money game, and how too often youth activists from the upper classes alienate working class activists with their condescenscion. Some nice tips for organizing a rally, but, aside from that, there's a lot of pomp (osity) with little circumstance