Since World War II, development projects have invested more than two trillion dollars towards health services, poverty alleviation, education, food security, and environmental initiatives around the world. Despite these efforts, 20% of the world still lives on less than $1.50 a day and the environment within which all live declines dramatically. There are clear limits to what further investments at this rate can achieve. This book advances the thesis that a more effective and universal foundation for social change and environmental restoration is not money, but human energy.

Using this approach Tibet recovered from being nearly deforested to having over 40% of its land area protected under conservation management. Using principles outlined in this book mothers in northeast India implemented a package of life-changing actions that halved child mortality. They parallel the way New York City has created a citywide conservation program over three-and-a-half centuries. Each of these examples is particular to its time and place, yet a shared set of principles is at work in all of them.

Improving the quality of life for a community starts by strengthening successes already operating. It involves local knowledge and a relatively simple set of principles, tasks, and criteria designed to empower communities. This highly readable account demonstrates how a comprehensive process for social change harnesses the energy of a community and scales it up with a rising number of participants becoming invested in increasingly high-quality work. Richly illustrated with photographs and stories of innovative people and programs in communities ranging from Nepal to Afghanistan to the South Bronx, it provides practical, proven guidelines for creating profound and sustained social change that begins in individual communities and grows to scale.

How can public health workers, policy experts, and medical professionals work with members of developing nations to promote social change in rapid, cost-effective, and locally appropriate ways? In Just and Lasting Change, Daniel C. and Carl E. Taylor present readers with an innovative, proven, and site-specific guide to helping communities thrive through growing their own change in partnership with experts, donors, and government. The Taylors built their decades-long careers by partnering with key thinkers to combat inequity, environmental degradation, and globalization. The SEED-SCALE model they describe enables people (wherever they might live) to transform their communities by analyzing their local context in relation to the global, taking appropriate actions based on their priorities and resources, and assessing what succeeding actions may be needed to continue making progress. Just and Lasting Change describes, step by step, how the SEED-SCALE model can be effectively implemented. Drawing from a variety of engaging personal experiences and case studies, this wide-ranging book describes early attempts to promote social development a century ago, as well as current efforts in South America, Africa, and Asia. It also reveals how community-based social change unfolded in America, spurred at different points by Abraham Lincoln's leadership style and the Green Bay Packers's ownership model, and presents readers with thematic global examples from the anti-smoking campaign, Green Revolution, Child Survival Revolution, and urban agriculture. The second edition of this pathbreaking handbook offers a hopeful description of how people have improved the quality of life in diverse communities around the world and is fully revised and updated with* Five completely new chapters * Thirteen years of scholarship and global evidence* Contributions from leading international experts in community-based development and public health