We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy

“You don’t create societies by burning things down, You create societies by building things.”

From the former faith adviser to President Obama comes a fresh manifesto for those who seek to promote positive change and build a more diverse and just democracy

The goal of social change work is not a more ferocious revolution; it is a more beautiful social order. It is harder to organize a fair trial than it is to fire up a crowd, more challenging to build a good school than it is to tell others they are doing education all wrong. But every decent society requires fair trials and good schools, and that’s just the beginning of the list of institutions and structures that need to be efficiently created and effectively run in large-scale diverse democracy.

We Need to Build is a call to create those institutions and a guide for how to run them well.
 
In his youth, Eboo Patel was inspired by love-based activists like John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Badshah Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Their example, and a timely challenge to build the change he wanted to see, led to a life engaged in the particulars of building, nourishing, and sustaining an institution that seeks to promote positive social change—Interfaith America. Now, drawing on his twenty years of experience, Patel tells the stories of what he’s learned and how, in the process, he came to construct as much as critique and collaborate more than oppose.
 
His challenge to us is clear: those of us committed to refounding America as a just and inclusive democracy need to defeat the things we don’t like by building the things we do.

Named “one of America’s best leaders” by U.S. News and World Report, Eboo Patel is Founder and President of Interfaith America, the leading interfaith organization in the United States. Under his leadership, Interfaith America has worked with governments, universities, private companies, and civic organizations to make faith a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division. Eboo served on President Obama’s Inaugural Faith Council, has given hundreds of keynote addresses, and has written five books. He is an Ashoka Fellow and holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. Eboo lives in Chicago with his wife, Shehnaz, and their two sons.