ldquo;You donrsquo;t create societies by burning things down, You create societies by building things.rdquo;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 democracyThe 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 thatrsquo;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. #160; 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 changemdash;Interfaith America. Now, drawing on his twenty years of experience, Patel tells the stories of what hersquo;s learned and how, in the process, he came to construct as much as critique and collaborate more than oppose. #160; 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 donrsquo;t like by building the things we do.
