Diane Paulus Quotes

Real, sustainable community change requires the initiative and engagement of community members.

And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.

My theory of change is that there are already millions of people working day in and day out on the ground to deliver on promises on global change. We need to strengthen those institutions and help those people in the field.

In fact, I have the privilege of traveling around our country and meeting people all over the country who are making a huge difference in the lives of their neighbors and themselves. That's what I'm really fortunate to be able to do.

When the youth of America gets together, amazing things happen.

By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.

I love being a part of something that is grassroots, and you can see the actual changes, the effect of what people do.

I want to spark ideas and conversations and inspire people to take active roles in their communities, relationships and their well-being.

If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people's lives are better, you know it's hard, and some people think it's boring.

Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out.

Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me.

The leaders come up from the volunteers that do the work, and it's amazing because then they do these incredible things in their community that they never thought they had the power to make that happen.

I think, in terms of activism associated with my films, be it 'Salaam Baalak Trust' or 'Maisha,' taking the idea of cinema as a way to change people, I feel heartened. I am glad that we have impacted thousands of lives.

To rebuild confidence in the power of people working together to create something better, we must give people the power to do precisely that for themselves.

The Kind Foundation was created to scale our social impact and be able to deepen our focus on fostering empathy and developing kinder communities.

When we make these decisions that we're going to commit ourselves to making a difference in the life of one person every single day, what happens is we actually build a whole generation of citizen leaders.

I've done community organizing my whole life and I think to myself, as an organizer, we don't wait for people to come to us and say, 'Help us organize something.' We go out into the community, and we bring the skills to a group of people to organize themselves.

I realized doing this work, identifying either issues or challenges or thinking about opportunities to actually impact people's lives, I could actually make things better, and bringing people around the table for solutions was something I liked doing and was actually something I was able to do fairly well.

After I returned from Oxford, I spent 5-6 years in a village in Madhya Pradesh - 25 km. outside Bhopal - along with a group of people working with the communities. But, over time, we realised that there were just too many constraints, and for ordinary citizens to be the change agent was not that easy.

ADCOLOR is an incredible organization that not only empowers people from all backgrounds to rise up but also to give back.

The challenge is to become part of the struggle, to make a positive difference.

I want to make a difference with people who want to make a difference, doing something that makes a difference.

The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.

Every single person has the power to change the world and help people.

That's the beauty of education, kids taking lessons out of the classroom and back into their own world where they can positively affect their family, their friends, and their greater community.