The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves

＂Reading this courageous book feels like the beginning of a social and personal awakening...I can’t stop thinking about it.＂--Brené Brown, PhD, author of Atlas of the Heart

For readers of Emergent Strategy and Dare to Lead, an activist’s roadmap to long-term social justice impact through four simple shifts.

We need a fundamental shift in our values--a pivot in how we think, act, work, and connect. Despite what we’ve been told, the most critical mainspring of social change isn’t coalition building or problem analysis. It’s healing: deep, whole, and systemic, inside and out.

Here, Shawn Ginwright, PhD, breaks down the common myths of social movements--a set of deeply ingrained beliefs that actually hold us back from healing and achieving sustainable systemic change. He shows us why these frames don’t work, proposing instead four revolutionary pivots for better activism and collective leadership:

Awareness from lens to mirror
Connection from transactional to transformative relationships
Vision from problem-fixing to possibility-creating
Presence from hustle to flow

Supplemented with reflections, prompts, cutting-edge research, and the author’s own insights and lived experience as an African American social scientist, professor, and movement builder, The Four Pivots helps us uncover our obstruction points. It shows us how to discover new lenses and boldly assert our need for connection, transformation, trust, wholeness, and healing. It gives us permission to create a better future--to acknowledge that a broken system has been predefining our dreams and limiting what we allow ourselves to imagine, but that it doesn’t have to be that way at all. Are you ready to pivot?

SHAWN GINWRIGHT is one of the nation’s leading innovators, provocateurs, and thought leaders for youth. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and currently serves as Professor of Education and Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. He has received numerous prestigious awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship from the U.S. State Department and honors from the National CARES Mentoring Movement. Dr. Ginwright currently serves as the chairman of the board of directors for the California Endowment. He also serves on the advisory board for the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning at the Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. Dr. Ginwright is the previous author of Hope and Healing in Urban Education: How Activists and Teachers are Reclaiming Matters of the Heart (Routledge, 2016); Black Youth Rising, Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America (Teachers College Press, 2010); Black in School - Afrocentric Reform, Black Youth and the Promise of Hip-Hop Culture (Teachers College Press, 2004); and co-editor of Beyond Resistance! Youth Resistance and Community Change: New Democratic Possibilities for Practice and Policy for America’s Youth (Routledge, 2006).