Sarah Van Gelder's The Revolution Where You Live: A Review

Sarah Van Gelder

In the summer of 2015, Sarah Van Gelder began a 12,000-mile journey in a 12-year-old pick-up with a camper to find examples of local efforts to change the American system.

Her book, THE REVOLUTION WHERE YOU LIVE, chronicles her travels and her findings.

Among the places that Van Gelder visited were the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, the Growing Power Garden in Chicago, the New Era Window Cooperative in Brighton Park, IL., the Black Community Food Network in Detroit, the Apple Street Cooperative in Cincinnati, La Minga Farm Cooperative in Prospect, KY., Appalshop in Pine Mountain, KY., the Eastern Mennonite University Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (in Harrisonburg, VA.) and Greensboro, NC.

Van Gelder’s journalistic instincts shine through (she is co-founder of YES! Magazine, a publication focused on social justice). She is quick to follow up on tips for who to visit and she seems to gain access and trust easily.

And she has a deep heart for her topic.

While the list of grass-roots organizations she spent time with during her 18-month journey is impressive, so is Van Gelder’s love of humanity.

While reading THE REVOLUTION WHERE YOU LIVE, curiosity got the better of me. I began to wonder how many of the organizations that she visited were still in business. Five years after her journey, a quick Internet search found that a few of them aren’t. But some are still active and thriving. That’s to be expected, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of all new business start-ups fail within the first year; 50 percent fail within five years.

Then I got to wondering, maybe the point of Van Gelder’s book wasn’t so much to give a series of business templates, but to encourage us to look beyond national politics and national solutions to things.

As part of that process, at the half-way point of her book, Van Gelder charts out the difference between a Culture of Connection and An Economy of Extraction.

In the Connection column, she writes real wealth is grounded in humanity, community, and ecological well-being; while extraction views wealth as money “that can be extracted and concentrated in a few hands.”

Within a Culture of Connection “societies flourish when wealth is widely distributed and circulates locally,” while An Economy of Extraction “rewards merit, and the concentration of wealth allows investment.”

Perhaps the most tangible difference is found in what these two types of cultures prize. In a Culture of Connection, “relationships come first: self, family, community, place, environment.” In the Extraction Economy, “money comes first, which, managed well, offers a small group of people a good life.”

Van Gelder incorporates a definition of restorative justice within her visit to the Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. “Restorative justice, which has its roots in indigenous circle processes, is a way of dealing with conflict and violations of trust. The practice is designed to restore relationships broken by a crime or other discord. In classic cases, a victim of a crime and the offender meet in a circle with others who have a stake in the outcome – the victim gets to ask questions about the crime, and the perpetrator offers an apology and may add context to the event, and together they work out terms of reparation. Advocates say this approach, compared to that of the criminal justice system, is more likely to result in healing for the victim, real accountability from the offender, and a less divided community.”

“Revolutionaries of the past have looked for something grand, something more important that community-level change. And there are good reasons, today, for wanting change to come quickly and to come big. But change that starts from the bottom up is more like evolution, drawing on the full complexity of who we are. That complexity is possible in the rich networks of interaction with people that happens at the local level. Face-to-face, we are less likely to stereotype each other or resort to oversimplified ideologies…”

“Our work, then, involves creating both inclusive, life-sustaining communities and the systems change that will allow them to thrive.”

Sarah Van Gelder’s THE REVOLUTION WHERE YOU LIVE may not be full of business tips for success, but it is full of human wisdom and hope. (Sidenote: And Gelder does include 101 Ways to Reclaim Local Power as an appendix!)