Power - A Practical Guide for Facilitating Social Change

The handbook is for people, within organisations, networks or within community groups, who want to explore power in relation to achieving change in the interests of the communities they are working with. Its purpose is to help facilitate discussions about issues concerning power in order to deepen our understanding of the causes of social problems and the various strategies that can be taken to achieve change. Between 2008 and 2010 the Carnegie UK Trust and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, jointly funded a programme of work on power, participation and social change. Over the course of two years, they worked with twenty organisations, which were focusing on various social issues, to explore ways in which the analysis of power could support them to achieve the social change they were working towards. This helped organisations to recognise their own power, as well as to understand power issues in relation to the political, social and economic environment within which they were working. This handbook, which accompanies the report and videos, is about taking action. It is a practical guide, which draws on the methods and tools that we used in our programme, to build the capacity of others, and, most importantly, to achieve social change. It is designed to be used collaboratively with others, to explore what can be achieved when working together to combine a range of different strategies and ways of analysing the issue.