For decades, the Work That Reconnects has been a transformational source of support for changemakers, helping countless individuals to move through denial and despair into meaningful, collaborative action. 

Coming Together in the Great Turning  (released Dec 2025) offers crucial updates and guidance for anyone seeking to expand this work’s  powerful impact to more people and further the Great Turning by taking steps to address systemic oppression particularly as it manifests in group settings. 

While Joanna Macy’s foresight in naming The Great Turning was prophetic, the beautiful work she created in the Work that Reconnects was in need of an update—so much has changed, evolving so rapidly in these past few years. For anyone who’s been drawn to the beauty and power of the Work That Reconnects, this book is a timely adjunct, providing tools, practices, framing, and facilitation tips to help make the Work more accessible to people of many ages and identities. Given the genius of Joanna’s work, it merits all the care, framing, and insight that may be readily accessed in these pages.
—Nina Simons, author, and Co-Founder and Chief Relationship Officer, Bioneers

Rooted in the deceptively simple premise that none of us are free until all of us are free, Coming Together in the Great Turning represents a decade of learning on how to make this already transformative and deeply powerful body of group work safer, more relevant and empowering for all who want to participate in it.

Co-edited by Molly Brown (Joanna Macy’s original co-author of Coming Back to Life), Aravinda Ananda (one of the lead convenors of the Anti-Oppression Resource Group), and Kurt Kuhwald, the book contains contributions from 16 authors from around the world that:

• Address the false split between environmental and social justice and identify the common roots of human rights abuses and ecological destruction
• Explore how intersectional systems of oppression manifest in group settings and provide strategies for shifting these dynamics to interconnected systems of support
• Demonstrate how to move beyond “-isms” and identity politics toward true diversity, equity, inclusion, allyship, solidarity, collective liberation, and a “Just Transition”
• Share powerful perspectives, teachings, and exercises drawn from the practical experience of facilitators worldwide
• Offer specific guidance for creating safer spaces and expanding cultural competency through anti-oppressive and trauma-informed facilitation.

This vital resource is great for facilitators and participants, change agents and activists, visionaries, and anyone who feels pain for our world and is committed to catalyzing change for a just and thriving world. While some of the content is geared specifically towards facilitation of the Work That Reconnects, much of the book is more broadly applicable to facilitators of any kind of transformative group work or anyone working for collective liberation.

I’d place this book next to Coming Back to Life on the shelf, not as a replacement but as a companion that brings the work into this new era with clearer eyes and a wider web. It remembers that forests fall when people are devalued, and that people fall when forests are cut down. It treats liberation not as a metaphor, but as the ground we plant in.
—John Seed, founder, Rainforest Information Centre, and long-time facilitator, Deep Ecology and the Work That Reconnects.

You can purchase a paperback or digital copy of the book directly from New Society Publishers, on Bookshop.org or Amazon.