Rollin’ deep with What We do Now. L-R: Dennis Johnson, Linda Sarsour, M. Dove Kent, and Brad Lander

Last night in Brooklyn, a capacity crowd jammed into the powerHouse Arena, with a few hundred more watching from home via Facebook Live, to celebrate the release of What We Do Now, our new book on standing up for your values in Trump’s America.

Two of the book’s contributors, Arab American Association of New York director Linda Sarsour and former Jews for Racial and Economic Justice director M. Dove Kent, appeared with New York City Councilmember Brad Lander in a conversation moderated by Melville House co-founder and co-publisher Dennis Johnson.

Topics discussed included this weekend’s upcoming Women’s March on Washington (Sarsour is one of four national co-chairs), the role of identity in building a grassroots movement, organizational lessons the left can learn from the Tea Party, and a whole lot more. Anger, fear, and vulnerability were on display — as were love, courage, and toughness. More concretely, there was expert advice about grassroots organizing, serious discussion about the relationship between spontaneous action and institutional engagement, and an excellent model of what effective political coalition-building might look like.

Here’s a clip of Sarsour laying down some wisdom about her reluctant support for Hillary Clinton:

Right on!

You can watch a video of the complete program here. If you’re in New York, you can catch another event in celebration of What We Do Now, featuring Dennis Johnson, Sharon Kleinbaum, and Harper’s publisher (and Melville House author) John R. MacArthur at Book Culture tomorrow (Thursday) night.

And wherever you are, if this sounds like the kind of event you’d like to be at, we’d love to help you make that happen. Click here to get started.