Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now (BK Currents) [Paperback]

Margaret Wheatley (Author), Deborah Frieze (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 11, 2011 | Series: BK Currents

No One Is Coming to Help. Now What?

In this era of increasingly complex problems and shrinking resources, can we find meaningful and enduring solutions to the challenges we face today as individuals, communities, and nations?

In Walk Out Walk On, we invite you on a learning journey to seven communities around the world to meet people who have walked out of limiting beliefs and assumptions and walked on to create healthy and resilient communities. These Walk Outs who Walk On use their ingenuity and caring to figure out how to work with what they have to create what they need.

From Mexico to India, from Columbus, Ohio to Johannesburg, South Africa, we discover that all communities have the intelligence and inventiveness to solve their seemingly insolvable problems. "We discovered a gift inside ourselves," one Brazilian said, "something that was already there."

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"If there is any hope for us, it lies in rediscovering and recreating community. Do not doubt this is possible. Read Walk Out Walk On and see for yourself--and see your self."
--Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline and coauthor of Presence and The Necessary Revolution

"Exuberant and galvanizing, this book takes us to where the future is happening--not in the corridors of power but at the grassroots where a 'trans-local' movement is unleashing human creativity and smarts."
--Joanna Macy, author of World as Lover, World as Self

"This book gives insight and beauty to what is becoming the new, new world--an intimate journey with communities and citizens cre- ating a future with their own hearts, hands, and relationships."
--Peter Block, author of Community and coauthor of The Abundant Community

Margaret Wheatley was cofounder and president of The Berkana Institute; Deborah Frieze succeeded her. Berkana partners with people developing healthy and resilient communities worldwide, many of whom are described in this book. Margaret is the author of five other books, including Leadership and the New Science and Perseverance.

About the Author

Margaret J. Wheatley is President Emerita and founder of The Berkana Institute, Meg has been working with people for many years to develop new practices and ideas for organizing people and communities. She is an internationally acclaimed speaker and author of several bestselling titles: Leadership and the New Science, A Simpler Way, Turning to One Another, and most recently, Finding Our Way.

Deborah Frieze is an author, entrepreneur and social activist. As former co-president of The Berkana Institute and co-founder of the Berkana Exchange, Deborah joined Berkana in 2002 to help bring its vision into the world and grow the Institute. She serves as a board member and is leading several initiatives, including Feeding Ourselves Sustainably, Swaraj University and multiple Sharing Our Learning projects. Deborah has an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (April 11, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1605097314
• ISBN-13: 978-1605097312
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #78 in Books > Business & Investing > Economics > Development & Growth
  • #93 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Poverty

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenged by Hope April 3, 2011

By Gibran

Format:Paperback

I have devoted most of my life to the quest for justice, the path has been beset by victory and loss, hope and frustration. I often find myself contending with a deep awareness that too many of us - including the radicals and do-gooders that I count among my friends - including my own self! All of us seem to be stuck in a paradigm that has reached a dead end. And yet it is all we know. And so we give our hearts and our passion, our energy and life force to a process that often seems doomed.

I have had the privilege of participating in some of the learning journeys beautifully described in this Frieze and Wheatley book. I can honestly tell you that they bring us as close as we can get to the experience without actually being there. What is beautiful about the book is that it brings the reader to that place of hope and upheaval that one experiences on a learning journey. We get to witness phenomenally hopeful responses to injustice and despair. Bold, autonomous, real walk outs from a system that is broken.

The reader is filled with a sense of deep human solidarity, a sense of pride in what these people can accomplish, a sense of hope in our shared capacity to walk out and walk on to something better, something new and something that is fundamentally good. But this does not happen without being beset by the nagging questions of scale, the questions of where is policy change? Where is the state? Isn't all of this just quaint - cute, beautiful but exceptional - irreplicable. We have to come up against the core assumptions of the dominant approach. And if you are a do-gooder, you have to come up against the core assumptions of your own approach.

It is not an easy process, and the conclusion is not forgone. But if you think that something is not working, not even with your own approach to change and social transformation, if you think that our humanity is in need of something else, then these walk outs are onto something, and they seem to be walking on to a very powerful place.

Read this book.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars this book contains the seeds of the future March 23, 2011

By Marco Polo

Format:Paperback

Sitting around fretting about the future of the human race is a favorite modern activity. Too many people, not enough food, climate change, not enough of this, too much of that. Most of the solutions being offered by development bankers, politicians, economists, and scientists merely shift problems from one place to another, postpone the day of reckoning, and/or create fragile interdependences that are certain to end badly, especially for the poor.

High-tech "silver bullets", like miraculous new sources of energy, won't solve the problems. Even if we do manage to create such new technologies, they are all too likely to perpetuate the status quo wherein the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and indigenous people lose their land.

Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley have boldly created a window into something different.

Read this book to hear inspiring stories about people who step forward, people who are personally invested in the problems being solved and who work together; and about communities that exchange ideas with other communities as peers, rather than having short-sighted non-solutions handed down to them from a distance.

Using these stories as a starting point, Walk Out Walk On captures insights about change better than anything else I've read. It is like going on your own learning journey, with these two very wise guides.

I hope that by reading this book, others will be inspired, and the gears of change will start turning.

As the Zapatistas say: "Otro mundo es posible."

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Important Stories of Resilience March 19, 2011

By Robert L. Stilger

Format:Paperback

This new book by Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley takes us on a delightful journey. It seems particularly appropriate that it is being released now when the brittleness of many of our systems is being revealed. Whether it is the collapse of existing regimes in the Middle East, or earthquakes and tsunamis in New Zealand and Japan, or nuclear meltdowns in Japan, I believe we are in a time when the instability of many systems is becoming more visible.

This book takes the reader on a different journey. You'll visit seven different communities in different parts of the world where people are stepping forward to make a difference. Guided by values and principles that work with life rather than against it, they know that they have the resources they need to create healthy and resilient communities.

It some ways I think this book is both invitation and challenge. It is an invitation to explore stories of how people are making a real difference in their communities across the world. It is a challenge to each of us to think about the changes needed in our own lives and communities and about how we will find our next steps forward.

Delightfully written, as we would expect from Frieze and Wheatley, and a visual treat of beautiful photos from these communities around the world, this book is a must for those who want to figure out how to make our communities healthy.

Bob Stilger
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