A review by veleda_k
Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism by Amy Richards, Jennifer Baumgardner

2.0

While not without its useful bits, Grassroots is severely hampered by its assumption that the reader enjoys a significant degree of privilege. Do you need a few thousand dollars to make your project work? Just ask your friends to chip in! Or your mother's friends. What a person is supposed to do if their mother's friends can't spot them $1000, or if they don't have a cousin who works in the mayors office, or an old babysitter on the school board, is not clear. "Work your connections," is good advice, but this book seems to assume that everyone has influential connections.

I very nearly put the book down for good after the authors championed unpaid internships. Apart from the problems inherent in unpaid internships, again it's assumed that the reader can go a semester or year without income.

A later chapter claims that the best way to affect environmental change is to buy green products and make individual choices as consumers. The idea that we just need to buy different light bulbs to save the environment is not backed up by facts. What's needed is genuine structural change as to what corporations are allowed to get away with. (I'm not saying don't buy eco-friendly light bulbs. I buy eco-friendly light bulbs! But it's not The Solution, and shouldn't be presented as such.) This seems to come from the same sort of mindset that informs the rest of the book.

Very disappointing.