Longtime THC Executive Director Randy Shaw has published six books on activism and winning social change. His first book, The Activist’s Handbook (University of California Press1996), chronicles some of his work at THC and in SF politics. He subsequently published a rewritten and updated version (UC Press 2013). In 1999 UC Press published Shaw’s Reclaiming America: Nike, Clean Air and the New National Activism. The book called for activists to engage more fully in the national politics that increasingly shape local struggles.

In 2008, UC Press published Shaw’s Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Social Change in the 21^st Century. The book shows how strategies and tactics of the farmworker movement still impact current social change struggles. Many alums of the farmworker movement went on to lead national campaigns around immigrant rights, to elect Nancy Pelosi to Congress, and to create a model for Latino voter outreach.

In 2015 Shaw published The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. It is the first book to uncover the Tenderloin’s lost history from 1907 to 2015. Shaw’s research for his founding of the Tenderloin Museum led him to write the book.

Shaw’s most recent book, Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America (UC Press 2018, paperback with new preface 2020), highlights the misguided housing policies of San Francisco and a dozen other progressive cities. Shaw lays out strategies to increase affordability in an increasingly expensive urban America.