The CAA supports Beautiful Trouble. Will you?

Beautiful Trouble will be a book & web toolbox that puts the best ideas and tactics of creative action in the hands of the next generation of change-makers, connecting the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest to the popular outrage of the current political moment.

From prank websites to militant carnivals, flash mobs to virtual sit-ins, social activism has a creative new edge that is melding prank and PR, direct action protest and pop art. More and more, activists and artists find themselves together on the barricades.

But in the heat of battle, the principles that make creative actions successful seldom get hashed out or written down — until now. Beautiful Trouble will arm our movements with their own best weapons.

Beautiful Trouble will pull together an interlocking set of design principles, best practices, innovative tactics and case studies, that will enable anyone to pull off effective creative actions.

We’re gathering the content from seasoned artists and activists across the world. Seven grassroots groups are contributing their best ideas, including Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, The Center for Artistic Activism, SmartMeme, Beyond the Choir, Waging Nonviolence, and The Ruckus Society. Longtime troublemaker and founder of Billionaires for Bush Andrew Boyd is facilitating the process, and independent publisher O/R Books has signed on to produce the book.

We’ve been crowd-sourcing the content, now we’re crowd-sourcing the funding from folks like you. We’re passing the hat here on Kickstarter so we can deliver on our promise to put the best possible tools in the hands of the next generation of change-makers. Your support is crucial to the project’s success.

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