PREFACE

Family Activism is about how to create a better world beginning with family and friends. The image of the young girl on the book’s cover portrays a glimpse of the vision to which this book is dedicated—connection, hope, joy, and love, a healthy world supporting healthy children. The faint motif on the cover, a symbol from my ancient Mexican indigenous culture depicting “movement that blossoms,” represents a central part of the strategy for advancing this vision.¹ Through consciously living to become more loving families, we evolve our culture so as to make it blossom.

This writing was inspired in part by the love for life taught to me by my family. It also arises from my feeling that we all share responsibility to help heal our troubled world and leave it a better place for our children. This book will prepare you with the outlook and tools to increase your family and community power for advancing positive change. It will help you fulfill the vision of “beloved community” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about—family and friends committed to caring for each other, serving our communities, and healing the world.²

The goal is that we become good friends to our families, and family to our friends, purposely encouraging their growth and caring commitment. This way of living requires developing a particular outlook and specific skills, while carefully tending to those around us. Some of us already do this every day, yet all of us can become better at nurturing love and power among the folks we consider family. Those who take up this call to be a family activist are caring people who seek to make all our interactions opportunities to foster x spirit, confidence, and social consciousness. They are people who appreciate that love is not only a feeling, it is caring in action.

Family activists seek health and success for their families and all others. They take time to communicate and connect, like the parents who make dinner conversation a family ritual, or the uncle who develops a garden to encourage interaction with his mother and nieces. Family activists create opportunities to foster family connection, like the cousins who organize a “unity circle” to honor their recent high school graduates. They also promote social involvement, like the grandmother who, at every annual Christmas gathering, asks her grandchildren what they have done to serve the community. In thousands of ways like these, family activists create teachable moments to develop the confidence, social awareness, and caring spirit among their loved ones that can help us build joyful families and better communities.

The most powerful medicine we have to heal and evolve our world is our families, when we are inspired to create love and transformation. We can mobilize the power of our networks of family and friends to turn our society away from irresponsible self-destruction. This begins with preparing ourselves to be family activists able to inspire and support our families to be their best. My belief in this approach inspired my writing Family Activism to provide you with wisdom about how to connect with your power, your vision, and each other. It is a leadership practice rooted in our hearts and flowering in the world. It is medicine for creating thriving families bettering our world and advancing our human evolution.

There are three parts to this book:

In the world of change agents, one of the guiding concepts is “know why before know how.” In other words, understand the philosophy of your strategy before focusing on the “how to.” With this in mind, Part I: The Family Perspective explains the principles guiding family activism and presents the Familia Approach. The chapters in this part remind us why caring for our families is so important, elaborate upon the meaning of family activism, explain the importance of family power to the process of social transformation, and illustrate how we can heal and empower our families.

This part of the book will make you more conscious of what you already know and assist you to deepen your thinking about family power and transformation. Many readers will find that my “Five Principles to Guide Family Activism” reflect much of their own philosophy, as they address fundamental issues about advancing family, community, and social change. Next, the five commitments that define the Familia Approach to family activism will, I believe, inspire your increased enthusiasm and capacity for mobilizing family and friends to become a force for change. To illustrate the power of the Familia Approach, this part concludes with the story of how my family was able to move from a period of dysfunctional communication to become a loving family that supports each other and advances community service and social change.

In Part II: Tools for Family Power, I review principles and tools to enrich your ability to serve your family as a powerful friend, coach, teacher, and facilitator. The first chapter, Getting Your Act Together, describes what we must each do to prepare ourselves to live successful lives and be good models of change. The subsequent chapters present and illustrate several essential tools and principles for creating family connection, empowering others, teaching love, and facilitating family gatherings. Given the tremendous potential that family conversations and gatherings have to nurture health and growth, I provide a number of stories that illustrate facilitation tools for making your network of family or friends more connected, inspired, and committed to transformation.

Finally, Part III: Moving from Family to Community Power reminds us that family activism is not about engaging in one act of family kindness and then expecting changes to occur. It is about applying your talents consistently over time to assist others to grow, friends to become family, love to blossom, and your community to work together to make a difference. This part contains two chapters illustrating how the Familia Approach ultimately can and has influenced positive change in our immediate and larger communities. Stories illustrate how ceremonies, councils, and unity circles are used to evolve more connected communities and a more caring culture. The final chapter provides several illustrations of how beloved communities have been able to affect changes, from inspiring a xii regional movement that is advancing multicultural respect to creating a project that registered thousands of new voters.

Throughout this book, you will encounter life stories to illustrate the use of various tools, principles, and strategies. Please pay attention to the details of my communication, as I am attempting to demonstrate practices that are typically best learned through direct participation. As my commitment to supporting and inspiring families began with my own family, a number of the stories here involve my parents, brothers, wife, daughters, nephews, and nieces. For this reason, an introduction to my immediate family would be helpful. My parents are Papa Everett and Mama Tita. I am the oldest son, followed by my brothers, Jack, Marcos, and Art. My wife is Rebeca Mendoza, and our daughters are Andrea and Cheli. While our family has expanded, my father and Jack have passed on to spirit life.³ Many of the stories involve a number of “created families,” those networks of friends who have become family to my family. In addition, some stories come from the experience of other family activists. For a number of these illustrations I use footnotes to add acknowledgements or pertinent information. In some cases, names and circumstances have been changed to safeguard people’s privacy.

My ultimate intent is to encourage you to apply the tools presented here to facilitate and inspire greater love, community, and service among your family and friends. To assist you in this journey, every chapter ends with several “praxis” questions. Praxis is the idea that creating positive change requires ongoing learning that is best done by reflecting on our experiences and studies to determine how to improve our practice. The questions after each chapter were chosen to provide you with the opportunity to reflect on the reading and your experience, and to bring them together. This practice can be challenging, yet it will support, prepare, and strengthen you in applying the principles and tools with your family and friends. To optimize your learning, I have two suggestions: Begin a journal to note your thoughts and plans that will evolve from the reading, and, most important, identify at least one person to serve as a learning partner, someone with whom you can share and discuss the ideas and questions that will surface. As family activism is invariably xiii about communicating and learning with others, your own process will be more enjoyable and fruitful if you work with a partner.

In my cultural tradition, it is important to introduce oneself to initiate a relationship. Given the relationship I hope to establish with you through sharing the life learnings in this book, I offer the following introduction to tell you about myself, my family, and our evolution of family activism.

ROBERTO VARGAS

Ventura, California

March 2008