Actions Speak Loudest: Keeping Our Promise for a Better World

Hope and change were the themes of Barack Obama’s historic presidential campaign, but America and the world are now faced with the daunting task of translating this stirring sentiment into reality. With contributions from thirty-five committed world citizens, the book in your hands is a starting point to help keep our generational promise to leave this world a better place than we inherited. By combining powerful ideas, images, and actions, it draws attention to some of the major issues facing this and future generations, ranging from childhood obesity to climate change. Most importantly, it sets forth workable ways to make a difference in your home, your community, and the greater world.
           
Actions Speak Loudest delves into the heart of thirty-two issues critical to the well-being of the next generation, with evocative, award-winning photographs; articulate and accessible essays; and attainable, ambitious ideas for action. The contributors—who span all walks of life and fields of work—are not just limited to well-known celebrities, authors, and experts but also include everyday American heroes who have overcome their own personal challenges to make a difference in the lives of youth in their community. Readers are invited to visit actionsspeakloudest.org, an online community where they can share their own ideas and recommended actions.
           
“Actions speak louder than words,” Mark Twain once said, “but seldom ever do.” This book holds open the prospect that our actions will indeed speak louder in our time.

Ideas, images, and actions to change our children’s future—
with contributions by household names and everyday heroes

Throughout my life I have witnessed ordinary Americans involved in extraordinary acts of service. Collectively, these individual acts build momentum and become a movement for lasting change. I encourage everyone who reads these pages to think about how you can do something big or small to make a difference in your house, on your block, in your community, or throughout the world.

—Alma Powell, Chair, America’s Promise Alliance

Actions Speak Loudest is a unique user’s guide to making a change. The photographs themselves are inspirational. Together with the essays and the “action” guides, they create a starting point for lifting the American spirit and stirring people to take a risk, make a sacrifice. The key idea is to shift the pessimism found in the poll numbers that suggest Americans are getting comfortable with the idea that our children will not have a better life than the current generation.
If you have this book in your hand you are a dangerous American. You have a tool for radical action to make our great country even greater for the greatest gift—our children.
—from the Foreword by Juan Williams

Publishers Weekly

In this essay collection, a crowd of professionals and activists working to improve the world (including Queen Noor, Dave Eggers, Newt Gingrich, and Rachel Ray) each comment on an issue, and suggest concrete ways readers can make a difference in four arenas of action: world, country, community and home. The volume begins, ambitiously enough, with a typically spirited President Jimmy Carter addressing world peace; his list of actions include teaching children that true strength doesn't come from violence or aggression, celebrating International Day of Peace (9/21) in our communities, and "asking your representatives the hard questions." ("Hold them accountable for the conflicts we enter as a nation.") Some of the most absorbing essays are written by ordinary citizen-activists: Richard Castaldo, who was shot at Columbine ten years ago, suggests that readers take reporting violence, especially in schools, seriously ("Eighty percent of victimizations go unreported"). Though some accounts are instantly forgettable, the best evoke genuine outrage, such as the story told by Children's Health Fund co-founder Irwin Redlener, about a homeless eight-year-old identified as "learning disabled" when his real diagnosis, tragically, was an untreated cleft palate, noted but neglected at infancy. This broad primer on the world's issues, big-scale and small, works as a useful gadfly for social change, appropriate for students and any neophyte do-gooder.
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Robert McKinnon is founder and president of YELLOWBRICKROAD, a company that designs social change through programming, communications, advocacy, and action. YELLOWBRICKROAD works on issues ranging from childhood obesity to climate change. McKinnon is proud to have partnered with change makers within the U.S.