The Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook is a set of resources for adult learners and teachers who are interested in building community. As editor, Andy Nash and her group of advisors explain: "We believe... that to really have a voice in the decisions that affect our lives, we need to go beyond voting to more direct forms of participation, such as community education, advocacy and organizing."

Tools for Teachers
The Sourcebook includes two kinds of tools: a collection of narrative accounts, mostly by teachers; and preparation and practice activities that focus on skill-and confidence-building. Most of these tools were gathered from past issues of The Change Agent, also a publication of the New England Literacy Resource Center, or from other documents.

The Sourcebook also includes a matter-of-fact set of challenges that teachers have faced in doing this kind of learning with their students. Balancing these challenges is a list of practical strategies for overcoming them including among others: students, especially teens' apparent lack of community interest; how to balance civic participation learning with the need for specific skills development; inconsistent student attendance; and how to deal with a topic of action that is very emotional.

The pieces in this collection are about real and serious community issues and how adult learners have tried to address them, for example: homelessness in Pulaski, Virginia; reforming welfare reform in Massachusetts and in Vermont; the rights of immigrants in Massachusetts to food stamps; reversing a new, and unreasonable policy requiring that food stamps be picked up in person in St. Charles, a small coal mining town in Virginia, and many others.

Resources and Activities
The Sourcebook is full of helpful resources and activities for learners and teachers including a list of resources in print and a Webliography of materials for incorporating civic participation and social justice issues into lessons; examples of rights such as the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Rhode Island Adult Student Bill of Rights enacted into law in 1999; some great community organizing and social change drawings to elicit writing and discussion; and others. For those of you who like standards and skills lists, in the beginning of each major section is a list of Equipped for the Future skills and activities addressed in that section.

I like many, many things about the Sourcebook, among them that it includes a wide range of activities from getting started activities to sophisticated and sustained community and political change projects. I also like that it balances specific, structured learning activities with more reflective, contextual pieces by teachers who have engaged in civic participation and community action learning with their students. This is a major contribution to the field of adult literacy education. Never have so many well-written and practical pieces been assembled in one easy-to- read, easy-to-use, thoughtful and provocative collection. This is for any adult educator anywhere in the United States who believes that civic participation and activism are important, and who is looking to see how colleagues do this work well.

The Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook is available from the New England Literacy Resource Center (NELRC). Contact Kristin Salsberry by phone, 617-482-9485, or by e-mail: ktofuri@worlded.org

David Rosen is the Director of the Adult Literacy Resource Institute. He can be reached at 617-782-8956 or by e-mail at: DJRosen@world.std.com