Who had time to read in 2020? Or, depending on who you ask, who had anything to do but read in 2020?

Regardless of where they fell on this spectrum, many leaders in the social impact world carved out time to absorb new ideas, perspectives and information this year. Future of Good asked 17 of these social impact-focused people for the best books they read in 2020 — and why you should read them, too. From non-profit strategy to poetry collections, their recommendations will fuel you for an impactful 2021.

Abdullah Snobar | Executive director, DMZ and CEO, DMZ Ventures

I would recommend Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, two former Navy SEAL commanders. The authors share their own experiences in the military and discuss how leadership principles from the battlefield can be easily adapted to both business and everyday life. I personally connected with many of these lessons as I come from a military background, but the core management principles explored in the book make it worth the read for any leader or aspiring leader, regardless of their background.

Alison Cretney | Managing director, Energy Futures Lab

A book that really impacted me this year is Leticia Nieto’s Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment: A Developmental Strategy to Liberate Everyone. Her approach to exploring the psychology and dynamics of oppression and privilege is so insightful and valuable. She shares a constructive skills-based approach to addressing power structures, privilege and equity, that truly is liberating – making this difficult and important work more accessible. It felt like growing fresh eyes and perspective on my personal awareness of privilege, illuminating blind spots and ways to hold collaborative spaces that can be more accessible and welcoming to a greater diversity of people.

Anjum Sultana | National director of public policy & strategic communications, YWCA Canada

An excellent book I’ve read that everyone should read is They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus and Growing Up by Eternity Martis. It’s a poignant memoir and details in stunning accuracy the insidious systemic racism and sexism on post-secondary campuses in Canada. It highlights experiences we do not talk enough about – gender-based violence experienced by young women. The COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on the increasing rates of gender-based violence during this crisis. As civil society pushes for a National Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence, we cannot ignore the generational implications.

Editor’s note: Two others we reached out to also recommended They Said This Would Be Fun.

Bonnie Foley-Wong | Head of investment strategy, Equality Fund

I am closing the year reading Lead From the Outside by Stacey Abrams, who served in the Georgia House of Representatives for 11 years, serving as Minority Leader from 2011 to 2017. This is the leadership book I’ve always wanted, for folks (like me) who find themselves starting on the outside of communities and ecosystems. Read in parallel with Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows), it’s helpful for people trying to shift systems and change the paradigm.

Douglas Pawson | Executive director, End Homelessness St. John’s 

The book that resonated with me the most this year was Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People. Klinenberg re-imagines how we think of ‘social infrastructure.’ I’ve always been interested in the ways our physical infrastructure supports our ability to have meaningful relationships with people and the institutions that govern our daily lives. Given our newfound proclivity for isolation – this book provided a refreshing blueprint for how communities can prioritize social infrastructure in a post-pandemic world.  

Jennifer DeCoste | Founder, LifeSchoolHouse

Priya Parker’s Art of Gathering: How we Meet and Why it Matters. I ordered it as soon as it was available because I am always keen to learn more about how to use any gathering of humans as a means to connect, rejuvenate and grow together. This has been especially important in 2020 because we are being asked to be creative about forms of gathering and I’ve noticed that, in many cases, the focus on tech has pulled energy away from design of good, intentional gatherings. There were some thought provoking references in this book I’ve been able to put into play immediately.

Jocelyn Formsma | Executive director, National Association of Friendship Centres 

The best book I’ve read this year was How to Lose Everything: A Memoir by Christa Couture. Despite her entire world seeming to crumble around her, Christa documents how she was able to grieve and struggle and eventually come to a place of happiness. I love this book because often we don’t get to focus on or talk about the hardships and grief that we experience as leaders. Having gone through my own grief experience, her lessons and her story really resonated with me. This is an important book for people to read because often leadership materials talk about how you can do better and be a better leader, etc. But this book explains that life isn’t always that great — sometimes there is no light, and it explores how to move past that. 

It is important to understand that people in the communities that we work in have experienced grief — something that many of us have also experienced. As leaders in social impact areas, we don’t always have the place to talk about those hardships — we can feel a lot of pressure to talk only about the things that we’ve overcome, rather than talking about the hardships that we’re currently going through. 

Jocelyn Mackie | Co-CEO, Grand Challenges Canada

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. It gave me some helpful insights to better understand my own privilege, and language to help have important discussions with friends, family and colleagues. Social impact-focused people, who focus on confronting inequalities, have an obligation to confront colonialization within its own sector.

Kate Higgins | Interim executive director, Oxfam Canada

Working my way through Between Power and Irrelevance: The Future of Transnational NGO by Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken, George E. Mitchell, Hans Peter Schmitz. This is an important book for those pondering the future of international NGOs and how they need to change. I am enjoying this book as it is helping me evolve my thinking on the role of international NGOs in the world.  International NGOs need to change – we need to shift power, resources and influence to those at the frontlines of social justice struggles. We need to become smaller, more nimble and more humble. We need to do this to be helpful, credible and relevant. This book is helping me think through some of this.

Katherine Hay | CEO, Kids Help Phone 

Two books really stood out for me this year. The first is the novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins – a compelling, gripping read about a woman and her young child escaping from Mexico and entering the U.S. as undocumented immigrants. It’s filled with horror, but also with love and humanity. It shares a powerful message that even in the midst of unimaginable situations, people have the ability to find little moments of beauty and happiness – and that by nature we are resilient! It feels deeply relevant to 2020, which has created so many challenges and we read first hand in real-time about the “human train” escape into the U.S. that had new, different horrors for families. Courage to persevere and still have hope. A good book! 

The second book I’d recommend is for those who want to sit down with a highlighter and deepen their impact in our sector: Building Unity by Mike Prosserman, who founded a hip hop-inspired mental health charity as a teenager that eventually reached over a quarter of a million young people around the world. This is not a typical book about how to succeed in the not-for-profit sector; he speaks about finding your inspiration, building a culture of trust in your organization and other values-based approaches to creating what he calls “responsible impact.” Everyone working in the not-for-profit space should pick up a copy of this book! 

Kayla Isabelle | CEO, Startup Canada

Radical Candor by Kim Scott. This book has “radically” changed my management style working with highly productive, but lean teams. From exclusive language you may be using, to hiring homogeneously, this book does a great job flagging blind spots you may not be considering as a leader. The author shares that “the fastest path to artificial relationships at work, and to the gravitational pull of organizational mediocrity, is to insist that everyone have the same worldview before building relationships with them.” Building sustainable, and diverse teams that acknowledge and respect unique backgrounds and perspectives, needs to be a focus for all businesses, particularly in the social impact space. 

Nadine Duguay-Lemay | CEO, Dialogue New Brunswick

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. Being the kind of person that is curious about human nature (I should have been a sociologist) and why we behave the way we do, this book provided interesting insights. I feel that as we put 2020 behind us and decompartmentalize what has taken place this year and how we have survived and adapted, there are chapters that can help us make sense of everything. I particularly like this part: “Defaulting to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and there of which is impossible to imagine.”

Naki Osutei | Associate vice president of social impact, TD Bank Group

The best book I read in 2020 was Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo (Man Booker Prize 2019). This book follows the lives of 12 very different (mostly) Black, British women, one gender-free person, over the course of several decades. I think this book is important for social impact-focused people because it powerfully and accessibly explores how race, sexuality, gender, history and economic stratification intersect. To the extent that your social impact work is about addressing inequities you’ll appreciate how this book illuminates how history informs the present and how systems affect experiences and opportunities.

Panthea Lee | Co-founder and executive director, Reboot

For non-fiction, I loved Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her. My anger at gross, violent injustices fuels much of my work. But many of us — especially womxn and racialized people — are taught to check our anger if we want to get things done. But our rage is justified, and important. The book helped me explore my relationship to anger and how I can better harness it. “Anger has a bad rap, but it is one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of all our emotions,” Chemaly writes. “It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rationale and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder. It bridges the divide between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be, between a difficult past and an improved possibility.”

For fiction and poetry, which are just as essential, I savoured Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (my whole body was vibrating after finishing it) and Aja Monet’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter (which I often return to for grounding and inspiration). Both are transcendent. 

Paul Nazareth | Vice president of education and development, Canadian Association of Gift Planners 

In my work educating charities, advisors and the public about legacy giving the problem is, there’s a lot of math! This is one of the reasons charities default to special events (transactions feel safe), donors default to just giving by reacting to who asks (it’s hard to think about your life’s purpose) and advisors are uncomfortable talking about philanthropy (because it’s more math). The Well-Lived Life: Live with Purpose and Be Remembered by already best selling Canadian author Lyndsay Green on personal finance and retirement is a no-math look at legacy. It is very sector-smart and includes mention of a lot of the strategies we believe in but in a simple readable way.

Sevaun Palvetzian | Chief Communications Officer, Rogers 

Without question, social impact is a team sport. If you’re doing it alone you’re doing it wrong. A couple of good books from the 2020 list that build on that point for me: Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter, by Alex Pentland and Forces for Good: the 6 Practice of High-Impact Non-profits by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant.

Tim Fox | Vice president of Indigenous relations and equity strategy, Calgary Foundation 

A Mind Spread out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott. I can relate to this read on so many levels. It is personally healing for me as I struggle with my own impacts of Intergenerational trauma, while making this very topic a crucial part of my professional responsibilities. I found it validating in the efforts I endeavour to make to embed this untold knowledge into the fabric of the organization I am part of, that is meant to inform new ways of knowing, being and doing. It’s an honest reflection of why historical context matters and how this context continues to impact contemporary times. We can’t always let formal schooling interfere with our education. Alicia shows a level of bravery and vulnerability that offers so much rich learning and unlearning in this space.

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