The Abundant Community
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Product Description
Product Description
This book is about a new possibility for us together to discover the real basis for a satisfying life. It is a life that becomes possible when we join our neighbors in creating a community that nurtures our family and makes us useful citizens.
We are besieged by messages from consumer society telling us that we are insufficient, that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We outsource our health care, child care, relationships, recreation, our safety, and our satisfaction. We are trained to become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. McKnight and Block take a thoughtful look at how this situation came about, what maintains it, and the crippling effect it has had on our families, our communities, and our environment.
Right in our neighborhood we have the capacity to address our human needs in ways that systems, which see us only as interchangeable units, as problems to be solved, never can. We all have gifts to offer, even the most seemingly marginal among us. It does not matter how rich or poor the neighborhood is. McKnight and Block suggest how to nurture voluntary, self-organizing structures that will reveal these gifts and allow them to be shared to the greatest mutual benefit. They recommend roles we can assume and actions we can take to reweave the social fabric that has been unraveled by consumerism and its belief that however much we have, it is not enough.
Each neighborhood has people with the gifts and talents needed to provide for our prosperity and peace of mind this book offers practical ways to discover them. It gives voice to the ideal of an abundant community. It reminds us of our power to create a hope-filled life. It assures us that when we join together with our neighbors, we are the architects of the future where we want to live.
About the Author
John McKnight is emeritus professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University and is cofounder and codirector of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute. He is the coauthor of Building Communities from the Inside Out and the author of The Careless Society.
Peter Block is a partner in Designed Learning, a training company that offers workshops designed by Block to build the skills outlined in his books. He is the author of Flawless Consulting, Stewardship, The Answer to How Is Yes, and Community. He is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the Organization Development Net-work’s 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.7 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Revoluntionary Thinking About Community, 29 Jun 2010
By Joshua P. OConner "Josh O'Conner" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (Hardcover)
When diving into the whole arena of civic/community engagement, most people are almost instantaneously bombarded with advice and information on how to link together organizations, where to get funding, and how to build the community with resources that come from outside. We are told that there are systems and processes that hold the key to a better life. John McKnight and Peter Block steer the reader in a different direction in "The Abundant Community". Rather than looking externally McKnight and Block encourage the reader to look within the community to find an abundance of resources.McKnight and Block start the book with an examination of how we have succumbed to consumerism in a manner so pervasive that we have eroded the very foundation of community. This examination shows how we have traded the inevitable imperfections in services or fallibility in humans for highly efficient systems which revolve around flawless management, fiscal performance, and scalability. "The Abundant Community" proposes a better, more connected way of living.
Rather than learning to blame problems on a lack of governance or those around us, McKnight and Block teach us to turn to our own resources and the resources already present in our community (the people) in order to build community competence. "The Abundant Community" is revolutionary in its message. By mobilizing community members to be more connected and more welcoming the community the can become the solution to its own problems. Instead of making the community and our lives more efficient, the authors focus on how we can create a life that is more compassionate. Within their vision, the gifts that exist among residents become a pooled resource and create a community of abundance.
To quote the welcome to "The Abundant Community", "This book is an invitation into a new possibility for each of us to live a more satisfying life".
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ideas and Actions for the Real Challenges that Face Us, 30 Aug 2010
By Christopher B. Bedford - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (Hardcover)
John McKnight and Peter Block have written a visionary manual for the world we are entering, the world we must create if we are to survive the crisises that threaten to overwhelm us. The economic changes caused by the end of the petroleum era are immense and immediate for an economy like ours. The humanitarian, ecological, and financial costs associated with climate change -- the increase in the severity of storms like in Pakistan -- the widespread change in rain and moisture patterns in the food baskets of the planet -- these too threaten to overwhelm government. Although its rhetoric is off point, the Tea Party Movement in the US is, in part, a response to this disintegration of global industrial systems.The Abundant Community offers answers to these challenges and more by redirecting our attention to the resources of our immediate community, neighborhood, family. Their message is commonsense and hopeful. This book is a transformation experience, one that can help launch a new movement -- one McKnight and Block call Asset Based Community Development or ABCD, for short.
Don't worry about the academic terminology. Buy this book. And share it with all you think are looking for a path forward. It has the answers.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
important, visionary onslaught against toxic consumerism, 26 Aug 2010
By Robert Kall "Rob Kall of Opednews.com" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (Hardcover)
This book has a laid back title, but within its covers there is a lot going on, a powerful, full frontal assault on the consumer system, consumer mind and the economic system that supports them.The book offers concrete, detailed ideas on how to return to community, how to do it competently, with heart, compassion, kindness and as unique individuals.
There's a growing conversation on relocalization, on transition towns, on moving past capitalism and the constant growth economy. This book provides a very important dimension to the solution-- a dimension truly at the heart of the answer.
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