Review: Be The Change by Gina Martin

Rating: 3.5/5
Genre: Non-fiction
Source: eARC from Netgalley for review
Pages: 304


Blurb (from Goodreads)
Without any legal or political experience, I changed the law and made upskirting illegal in eighteen months. But this book is not about changing the law. It's not about me. This is yours. It's your handbook, your road map and your toolkit for pushing for change at absolutely any level. From using social media to gain support and to getting pro bono legal support, to regaining your confidence after a perceived "failure" (hint: there is no such thing), I wrote this book to make sure you believe in your voice, feel ready to put yourself out there and know how to start making things happen. Because my god, if I can do it, so can you.

BE THE CHANGE is an essential handbook for the modern activist, whether your campaign is big or small, local or global . . . or somewhere in between. If you want to challenge injustice in your school, workplace or community; if you want to lend your voice - and more - to a charitable cause close to your heart; or if you are inspired to take on a complex issue on a massive scale, Gina Martin's practical and empowering advice will give you the tools you need to ensure your voice is heard, your actions are noticed and your demands are met.

The Good:

The main thing that pleased me about this book is that it's full of actual practical advice, which you don't always get in this kind of book. For example, it talks about getting started with a campaign - whether it's active, where it's something you just start out of nowhere, or reactive, like hers was when she started the campaign in response to being upskirted. She had an interesting point that you can prepare even for a reactive campaign by being generally educated on the topic and thus knowing where the gaps are for when you're spurred into action. She also talks a little about how to research and diagram and plan out the issue, to break it down into a small, concrete issue that you can tackle, and how to do press releases and interviews. She breaks it down into different stages - awareness, advocacy and action, where you make people aware of the problem and your proposed solution, get members of the public and specific advocates such as celebrities on your side (she even has a bit on reaching out to celebrities and making it as easy as possible for them to do what you want), and then implementing the change you want, which for her was a law. I liked her idea of 'gatekeepers', where you identify the people that can make the change you want and how you're going to get to them - strategy. Hers were Westminster MPs.

I honestly don't have that much more to say in this part of the review - I was happy with it because it was full of straight-forward tips for starting a campaign, and had pretty much no biography. Does what it says on the tin. Plus, she was someone who had almost single-handedly done a successful campaign, so she could actually speak authoritatively on a sort of 'finished activism project'.


The Bad: 

Unfortunately, while it has good advice for doing a campaign on a concrete, social issue like hers (getting a specific law to prosecute upskirting as a sex crime), a lot of it doesn't seem to work very well for abstract, scientific issues like climate change. Climate change can't be fixed with one simple law, and the complexity of the science at hand and the global climate system makes it very hard to think of an unequivocally good thing to advocate. She also kept saying that if you don't have a personal connection to the topic then it's 'not your story to tell' - but for people in my part of the world, that would mean we just wouldn't do climate activism at all because it hasn't affected us badly yet. Even in parts of the world experiencing more frequent droughts and floods and hurricanes, it's very hard to attribute a particular event directly to anthropogenic carbon emissions. I don't think she's wrong, exactly - it's true that having a personal story to tell when you're campaigning makes what you're saying more powerful - but I just don't think it works for climate. Yes, we can and should amplify the stories of those directly affected, but for such a huge global change we need anyone to be able to campaign.

I also wasn't sure about some of her advice, like her declaration that to actually change anything you need to do it from the inside - I feel like revolutions are counterexamples to that! She also says that activists should have an answer and not just point out a problem, which I disagree with. Yeah, ideally have a solution, but if you don't you should still feel free to raise awareness of a problem. There are people employed to come up with solutions.

Some relatively minor niggles: 

• I didn't agree with her politics in parts, like recommending and admiring a homophobic LGBT ambassador, but that's not really to do with the quality of the book
• There was something that felt like performative wokeness - a whole chapter of the book on white privilege, yet (if I recall correctly) nothing about actually using your white privilege to de-escalate situations of police brutality, for example.