Power to the People: Use your voice, change the world

(Hardback)

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Danny Sriskandarajah learned the value of citizenship at a young age as the child of Tamil migrants who moved from Sri Lanka to Australia. Arriving in the UK as the first Rhodes scholar from an Asian immigrant background, he has gone on to run a series of civil society organisations, and has become a leading voice in the third sector.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE is his radical manifesto for change designed to inspire citizen action around the world. The book presents a blueprint for how we, as individuals, can make a difference through greater community engagement, and how we can deliver a society that works for the many and not the few. He speaks to voter apathy and a growing sense that elections no longer matter, with politicians and institutions too focused on short-term issues to grapple with complex global problems such as climate change, rising inequality, and digital disruption. Yet the book is also filled with inspiring real-life examples of citizen power in action, ranging from a volunteer-run repair cafe in Danny's local suburb to Avaaz's successful campaigns to tackle endemic corruption in Brazil.

From public ownership of social media spaces to democratising share ownership, and from re-energising co-operatives to creating a people's chamber at the United Nations, this campaigning book has a clear mission to make us reclaim our power as citizens of the world.

Author Bio

Danny Sriskandarajah is the child of Tamil migrants who fled Sri Lanka's civil war for Australia, before moving to the UK in 1998. After running CIVICUS, the Johannesburg-based alliance of civil society organisations with members in more than 180 countries, he became CEO of Oxfam GB in early 2019 with a brief to sort out Oxfam's failure to prevent sexual abuse in Haiti and elsewhere. He did so quickly, introducing reforms, notably by involving partner organisations, and by challenging Oxfam's fund-raising orthodoxies.

Danny is at heart a thinker and a radical who believes that governmental and charity structures are based on outdated nineteenth-century models. His opinion pieces have been published in newspapers in more than 30 countries, and he regularly appears on broadcast media, including programmes such as the BBC's Today programme and Question Time. He has spoken at over 500 events in some 70 countries, including at the United Nations General Assembly, the World Economic Forum Annual Meetings at Davos, and committees of both Houses of the UK Parliament. He is the CEO of the New Economics Foundation, the progressive think tank. He tweets @dhnnjyn