10 Books That Will Inspire You To Be The Change
Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash
Most of us don’t come into the world understanding the complexities of education access, poverty, conflict, or any other number of the challenges faced by people throughout the world. For those dedicated to making a difference, whether it’s within your local community, or abroad, inspiration comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s family members or an experience in school. Sometimes it’s a book.
For us, it was a combination of all these things as we strived to be conscious, kind, and action-oriented citizens working toward a more just and equal world. Supporting a better world is why we started The Kikulu Foundation, and it’s why we’re devoted to creating a welcoming community of like-minded engaged global citizens.
We’ve compiled 10 insightful books in particular that have played a crucial role in expanding our worldview. They helped illuminate how we can be part of turning the tide to have a happier, healthier world, and how we can help solve problems and make the world better for us all.
1. The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz
The Blue Sweater is the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. It all started back home in Virginia, with the blue sweater, a gift that quickly became her prized possession—until the day she outgrew it and gave it away to Goodwill. Eleven years later in Africa, she spotted a young boy wearing that very sweater, with her name still on the tag inside. That the sweater had made its trek all the way to Rwanda was ample evidence, she thought, of how we are all connected, how our actions—and inaction—touch people every day across the globe, people we may never know or meet. From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters—women dancing in a Nairobi slum, unwed mothers starting a bakery, courageous survivors of the Rwandan genocide, entrepreneurs building services for the poor against impossible odds.
2. Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, Half The Sky tells the story of women’s oppression throughout the globe and some successful efforts made to combat it. The book tells the stories of women who have experienced sex trafficking, the inability to access education, and the lack of basic human rights. This book goes beyond simply describing the global tragedy of gender violence and injustice, to remind us that women hold the solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges. The book highlights women around the world who have risked their lives to fight illiteracy, poverty, and violence and push all women’s rights forward.
3. The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change by Roger Thurow
Africa’s smallholder farmers, most of whom are women, know only misery. They work their land the same way that their ancestors did centuries before them. They have inadequate seeds, soil that lacks nutrition, primitive storage facilities, sometimes impassable roads, and no capital or credit. The combination of these factors translates to harvests that are less than one-quarter the yields of Western farmers. The reality for Africa’s small farmers is a scene of malnourished children, backbreaking manual work, and hopelessness. This book follows a group of women as they come together to try to change through social enterprise.
4. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom is a Yale psychologist and a TED Talk “millionaire” who argues that empathy is bad for all of us. Empathy, he says, is biased and often leads us to bad decisions and prejudice. He demonstrates his argument with examples, such as Jessica McClure, the baby stuck in the well in Texas in 1987, to show how we can empathize with the plight of one person but remain indifferent to the thousands of faceless and preventable deaths. Ultimately, Bloom suggests that we should leave empathy behind and apply “rational compassion” instead.
5. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl is a psychiatrist and a Nazi death camp survivor. This book, written in 1964, tells the story of Frankl’s experience in four different concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Although he survived, his parents, brother, and pregnant wife all died as a result of this experience. In this book, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering, but we can choose how to cope with it, and we can find meaning from it. Through his theory of logotherapy, he maintains that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, but rather the pursuit and discovery of what we find meaningful.
6. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. This book transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems: eviction. Eviction is hugely disruptive and those who are evicted face loss of property, intensified poverty, and a decline in the quality of housing they are able to afford. Eviction also disrupts jobs and can increase depression and addiction. This book explains that it is not only that poverty contributes to eviction, but that eviction pushes people deeper into poverty.
7. The Water is Wide by Pat Conroe
The Water is Wide tells the story of Pat Conroy’s experience teaching on the island of Yamacraw off the coast of South Carolina. The book discusses both the challenges of educating underserved children, but also examines the people hired to educate them and provide them with a better life. To help the students learn, he adopts non-traditional teaching methods and takes the children on field trips off the island so that they can see what the world outside the island is like. This book describes how the people on the island live without true education and it demonstrates how a society can imprison people, limiting their hopes for a better future.
8. The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
This book is the story of 26 men who attempted to cross the Mexican border into the Southern Arizona desert in May 2001. Of the 26 men that entered the desert, only 12 survived. Luis Alberto Urrea tells the story of why these men chose to come to the United States and the terrible, deadly journey they faced once they walked into the desert. This book shines a light on the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border through exposing the corruption, human smuggling, and environmental dangers that have led to the deaths of thousands of migrants since the mid-1990s.
9. Be the Solution by Michael Strong
Increasingly people are searching for meaning and purpose in their lives as employees, as consumers, and as investors. More and more people have enough material goods and have turned their focus to the quality of goods, the experience associated with services, and the way that companies act as members of broader society. As people reach the point where they don’t need to acquire more material things, how do these people “be the solution” in the world. This book provides a perspective focused on entrepreneurial and Conscious Capitalist solutions for how to create a better world.
10. $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer
After two decades of research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen when she conducted research in the early 1990s: households surviving on virtually no income. In this book, she teamed up with Luke Shaefer, an expert in calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children. The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. This book provides new evidence in the national debate on income inequality in America.