Collective Visioning

preface

I HAVE come from growing up in extreme poverty to being a leader of a national organization. If anyone had told me when I began working—first, in tobacco, later in a hosiery mill, and then moving my way up to be a secretary—that I could make real change in the world and actually write books, I would have looked at that person as if he or she were talking another language. I was not the leader type and did not have the education or confidence to do any of these things.

When I first started organizing, I went to trainings that were pretty conventional. They taught me a lot about working for change. I also began to ask why some of the techniques I was learning didn’t work for me and other poor people in my own community. I would go to leadership ...