Beautiful Trouble Inc.

What is Beautiful Trouble?

Beautiful Trouble is a book, web toolbox and international network of artist-activist trainers whose mission is to make grassroots movements more creative and more effective.

We’re a collaborative effort by 70 artist-activists-strategists and 10+ leading creative campaign organizations including the YesMen/YesLab, Ruckus Society, Other 98% and others. Praised by Naomi Klein as “elegant and incendiary,” the book is being used by campaigns and classrooms across North America and Europe; it just sold its 10,000th copy, and has been translated into six languages. A beta of the web toolbox (you’re looking at it) is online, and offers all the book content (and more) to the public under a creative commons license.

Who are we exactly?

The people who came together to write Beautiful Trouble stayed together and became a community: an extraordinary alliance of artists, trainers and creative campaigners who continue to make, teach, and celebrate game-changing creative activism in several exciting ways:

Training Network

At the 2 year mark, we’ve conducted over 30 trainings, expanded and diversified out training network, field-tested a series of curricula, assembled a trainer’s handbook, and built a beta version of an open-source library of training tools.

We’ve had notable early successes: in LA, bringing a new creative edge to the fight for fast food worker rights; and in NYC, giving voice to the grassroots wave that ushered mayor DeBlasio into office. And we’re just coming off of a robust five months on both sides of the Atlantic with a series of trainings and creative capacity building efforts in support of the People’s Climate Mobilization in New York, a 5-day creative action intensive in Budapest, a 2 day workshop in Paris for climate activists, along with workshops from Mississippi to Maine to Myanmar.

Read our latest training news.

Beautiful Solutions (@be_solutions)

In partnership with senior staff from the New Economy Coalition, a second book is in the works: Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for the Future. Building off the groundbreaking model of the original, the new book will focus on constructive solutions, gathering the most promising and contagious strategies for building a more just, democratic and resilient world. In partnership with Naomi Klein, we recently launched an online “solutions gallery” housed alongside the website for her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. We’re also working with The Other 98% to turn book modules into inspiring solution stories that can vastly expand the reach of the project.

Beautiful Rising (@BeautRising)

We’ve teamed up with the international NGO ActionAid to convene front-line activists from hotspots across the Global South. Adapting the Beautiful Trouble methodology, we are helping participants map the approaches and tactical innovations that have been most effective at addressing the challenges faced by Global South movements. These strategies are now online via an innovative toolbox for global changemakers, and a book version will be out in early 2017.

Climate Action Lab (@climateribbon)

BT’s Climate Action Lab is an incubator of exemplary creative interventions to advance climate justice. We brought the Climate Ribbon to the streets of New York during the People’s Climate March, and to the streets of Paris for the COP21 climate conference. Dubbed “an AIDS Quilt for the Climate Justice movement,” the project has been inundated with requests from communities and congregations seeking to host their own climate ribbon ceremonies. Download your own DIY kit here.