John McKnight

John P. Kretzmann

This guide summarizes lessons learned by studying successful community-building initiatives in hundreds of neighborhoods across the U.S. It outlines what local communities can do to start their own journies down the path of asset-based development.

A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets

Building Communities from the Inside Out

Peter Block

This book reminds us that a neighborhood that can raise a child, provide security, sustain our health, secure our income, and care for our vulnerable people is within the power of our community.

Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

The Abundant Community

Ivan Illich

Irving K. Zola

Jonathan Caplan

Harley Shaiken

Collection of essays challenging the power and mystery of the professions.

Disabling Professions

Cormac Russell

Find out how to uncover the hidden talents, assets, and abilities in your neighborhood and bring them together to create a vibrant and joyful community. It takes a village! We may be living longer, but people are more socially isolated than ever before. As a result, we are hindered both mentally and physically, and many of us are looking for something concrete we can do to address problems like poverty, racism, and climate change. What if solutions could be found on your very doorstep or just two door knocks away? Cormac Russell is a veteran practitioner of asset-based community development (ABCD), which focuses on uncovering and leveraging the hidden resources, skills, and experience in our neighborhoods. He and John McKnight, the cooriginator of ABCD, show how anyone can discover this untapped potential and connect with his or her neighbors to create healthier, safer, greener, more prosperous, and welcoming communities. They offer a wealth of illustrative examples from around the world that will inspire you to explore your own community and discover its hidden treasures. You will learn to take action on what you already deeply know-that neighborliness is not just a nice-to-have personal characteristic but essential to living a fruitful life and a powerful amplifier of community change and renewal.

Discovering the Health, Wealth, and Power of Neighborhoods

The Connected Community

We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us. The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community. This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all.

Walter Brueggemann

"The Other Kingdom is about reframing how society views its communal identity. The book proposes to identify what has been considered sacred language and use it as an opening into the experience of community and the commons. It lays out a faith narrative without the negative traces of sectarianism. Readers are dared to imagine the human benefit of an alternative to the market ideology that defines our culture, called the Neighborly Covenant because it enlivens and humanizes the social order. The Other Kingdom proposes language for alternative ways to a covenantal culture, one that is active beyond election years and has different substance in defining society's communal identity"--

Departing the Consumer Culture

An Other Kingdom

" We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us. The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community. This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all. "

John McKnight

About

Books

Join the club