The Empowerment Manual. A Guide for Collaborative Groups Filled with case histories, illustrative stories, and, most importantly, clearly written exercises for honing your collaborative skills, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in building community and truly empowering themselves and others. Toby Hemenway, Author, Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home - Scale Permaculture.

There area literally millions of collaborative, voluntary groups around the world, comprising a powerful force for social change. Tapping into a vibrant wellspring of energy and creativity, these organizations have the unique potential to succeed where more established and structured institutions are destined to fail - if their members can get along together. The Empowerment Manual is a comprehensive guide for groups seeking to organize with shared power and bottom-up leadership to foster vision, trust, accountability and responsibility. This desperately needed toolkit provides keys to: . understanding group dynamics . facilitating communication and collective decision-making . dealing effectively with difficult people. Drawing on four decades of experience, Starhawk shows how collaborative groups can generate the cooperation, efficacy and commitment critical to success. Her extensive exploration of group process is woven together with the story of RootBound — a fictional ecovillage mired in conflict — and rounded out with a series of real-life case studies. The included exercises and facilitator’s toolbox show how to establish the necessary structures, ground rules and healthy norms. The Empowerment Manual is required reading for anyone who wants to help their group avoid disagreement and disillusionment and become a wellspring of creativity and innovation.