Practical Visionaries is the first full-length account of an Australian aid organization. It tells the story of Community Aid Abroad, from its origins in the Australia of the 1950s until the present day. Drawing on her own long association with the organization, as well as on research conducted in Australia, Asia, and Africa, Susan Blackburn analyses the efforts of CAA and its Third World partners to create a world without poverty and injustice.

Almost from the start, Community Aid Abroad has been unusually ambitious in its aims of promoting development through aid and trade, of educating Australians about their relations with the Third World, and of attempting to influence public policy. Finding effective means of pursuing these goals has involved conflict and frustration as well as hard-won successes, testing the limits of what a voluntary organization can achieve. Now that it has become a well-known national institution, a major challenge facing CAA is to live up to its own self-image as part of a global social movement.