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Overview
But even as we acknowledge the need to build community, the dominant on-the-ground practices about how to engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially unchanged. We still believe community is built with better messaging, more persuasion, and social events for people to get to know each other better. All of which is naïve.
In this new edition, Block draws on a decade of putting these ideas into practice to emphasize what has worked and extract those thoughts that were nice but had no durability. He explores how technology, instead of bringing us together, has driven us into more isolation. New examples show that community building can be a more powerful way to address social problems than more traditional policies and programs. And encouragingly, Block insists this is really simple, once we decide it is essential. He offers a way of thinking that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781523095568 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2018 |
| Edition description: | Revised |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 204,409 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Insights into Transformation
Social fabric is created one room at a time. It is formed from small steps that ask "Who do we want in the room?" and "What is the new conversation that we want to occur?" In community building, we choose the people and the conversation that will produce the accountability to build relatedness, structure belonging, and move the action forward. It is in this process that accountability is chosen and care for the well-being of the whole is embodied. Individual transformation is not the point; weaving and strengthening the fabric of community is a collective effort and starts from a shift in our mind-set about our connectedness.
A series of core insights informs us how to answer these questions. These insights include ideas about focusing on gifts, on associational life, and on the way all transformation occurs through language. Also critical are insights about the context that governs the conversations and the willingness to speak into the future.
Two additional strands in the fabric of community explored here are the need for each small step to capture a quality of aliveness and be an example of the larger world we want to inhabit. There is an established method for accomplishing this aliveness that values all voices in the room, uses the small group even in large gatherings, and recognizes that accountability grows out of the act of cocreation. The essence of creating an alternative future comes from citizen-to-citizen engagement that focuses at each step on the well-being of the whole.
* * *
Major influences on the belief system underlying this methodology of communal transformation come from several disciplines and people whose work has been radical in many ways; their insights are foundational for our purposes. There are many others who inform us and are mentioned in this book, but these five touch the core: John McKnight, Werner Erhard, Robert Putnam, Christopher Alexander, and Peter Koestenbaum. The sixth collection of insights is from a group of wizards who have given life to large group methodologies — some of whom are Marvin Weisbord, Kathie Dannemiller, Dick and Emily Axelrod, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Barbara Bunker, Billie Alban, and David Isaacs and Juanita Brown.
There are two more people whose insights are important to understanding how the world changes. One is David Bornstein. His book How to Change the World analyzes nine social entrepreneurs who created large social movements around the globe. David's summary of why they were successful is worth our attention. Finally, I too briefly include the thinking of Allan Cohen. He translates the world of emergence and complex adaptive systems into language that once in a while I begin to think I understand.
I chose all of these people because I personally know most of them, and they are the ones who have shaken my own thinking; their ideas have, for me, endured the test of time and experience.
What follows is a summary of the aspects of these people's work that are useful to this enterprise. I'll summarize their insights briefly here and then weave them throughout the rest of the book.
The McKnight Insights: Gifts, Associational Life, and Power
John McKnight is a leading light in the world of understanding the nature of community and what builds it. Three of his insights have permanently changed my thinking.
Focus on gifts. First and foremost, he asserts that community is built by focusing on people's gifts rather than their deficiencies. In the world of community and volunteerism, deficiencies have no market value; gifts are the point. Citizens in community want to know what you can do, not what you can't do.
In the professional world of service providers, whole industries have been built on people's deficiencies. Social services and most of medicine, therapy, and psychology are organized around what is missing or broken in people.
McKnight points out that if you go to a professional service provider and say you have no deficiencies or problems, that you just want to talk about your gifts and talents, you will be shown the door and treated as though you are wasting their time. Go to an association or a group of neighbors and tell them what your capabilities are, and they get quite interested.
This insight is profound if taken seriously, for it eliminates most of the conversations we now have about problem diagnosis, gap analysis (if you do not know what this is, be grateful), weaknesses, and what's wrong with me, you, and the rest of the world. It also underscores the limitation of labeling people. McKnight knows that the act of labeling, itself, is what diminishes the capacity of people to fulfill their potential. If we care about transformation, then we will stay focused on gifts, to such an extent that our work becomes simply to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center.
John's focus on gifts has led to his founding a worldwide movement called Asset-Based Community Development. Simply put, this movement declares that if we want to make communities stronger, we should study their assets, resources, and talents. It is in the attention to these things that something new can occur.
Associational life. The second insight that is relevant here has to do with the limitations of systems. John sees a system as an organized group of funded and well-resourced professionals who operate in the domain of cases, clients, and services. As soon as you professionalize care, you have produced an oxymoron. He says that systems are capable of service but not care. Talk to any poor person or vulnerable person and they can give you a long list of the services they have received. They are well serviced, but you often have to ask what in their life has fundamentally changed.
The alternative to a system is what John calls "associational life": groups of people voluntarily coming together to do some good. In the disabilities world, John's work has been enthusiastically received. This has led to a widespread effort to take people with visible disabilities out of institutions and systems and bring them back into neighborhoods. Support groups are created, slowly, voluntarily, with a lot of phone calls and requests, so that ordinary citizens come together to support their new neighbors. This strategy brings generosity back into a neighborhood, and in the doing, citizens whose disabilities are hidden (all of us) experience a transformation in their own lives.
Power in our hands. The third insight for community building is John's faith in citizens to identify and solve problems for themselves. He finds that most sustainable improvements in community occur when citizens discover their own power to act. Whatever the symptom — drugs, deteriorating houses, poor economy, displacement, violence — it is when citizens stop waiting for professionals or elected leadership to do something, and decide they can reclaim what they have delegated to others, that things really happen. This act of power is present in most stories of lasting community improvement and change.
To summarize these insights from the work of John McKnight and his partner, Jody Kretzmann: Communities are built from the assets and gifts of their citizens, not from the citizens' needs or deficiencies. Organized, professionalized systems are capable of delivering services, but only associational life is capable of delivering care. Sustainable transformation is constructed in those places where citizens, not institutions or experts, choose to come together to produce a desired future.
The Erhard Insights: The Power of Language, Context, and Possibility
For over thirty years, Werner Erhard has created thinking and learning experiences that have affected millions of people's lives. Many of the ideas he has worked with derive from the work of others, but Werner has named and integrated them into something more powerful than where the thinking began. His work lives through the Landmark Corporation and other licensees. What I select from his work here is a small part of his legacy, but these are the ideas that have changed my life and practice.
The power of language. Werner understands the primal creative nature of language. Many of us have focused for years on improving conversations. We have known that dialogue and communication are important tools for improvement. Werner takes it to a whole new realm by asserting that all transformation is linguistic.
He believes that a shift in speaking and listening is the essence of transformation. If we have any desire to create an alternative future, it is only going to happen through a shift in our language. If we want a change in culture, for example, the work is to change the conversation — or, more precisely, to have a conversation that we have not had before, one that has the power to create something new in the world. This insight forces us to question the value of our stories, the positions we take, our love of the past, and our way of being in the world.
The power of context. Another insight is in the statement, "The context is decisive." This means that the way we function is powerfully impacted by our worldview, or the way, in his language, that "the world shows up for us." Nothing in our doing or the way we go through life will shift until we can question, and then choose once again, the basic set of beliefs — some call it mental models; we're calling it context here — that lie behind our actions. Quoting Werner, "Contexts are constituted in language, so we do have something to say about the contexts that limit and shape our actions."
Implied in this insight is that we have a choice over the context within which we live. Plus, as an added bargain, we can choose a context that better suits who we are now without the usual requirements of years of inner work, a life-threatening crisis, finding a new relationship, or going back to school (the most common transformational technologies of choice).
The way this happens (made too simple here) is by changing our relationship with our past. We do this by realizing, through a process of reflection and rethinking, how we have not completed our past and unintentionally keep bringing it into the future. The shift happens when we pay close attention to the constraints of our listening and accept that our stories are our limitation. This ultimately creates an opening for a new future to occur.
The power of possibility. Changing our relationship with our past leads to another aspect of language that Werner has carefully developed. This is an understanding of the potential in the concept and use of possibility. Possibility as used here is distinguished from other words like vision, goals, purpose, and destiny. Each of those has its own profound meaning, but all are different from the way Werner uses the word possibility. Possibility, here, is a declaration: a declaration of what we create in the world each time we show up. It is a condition, or value, that we want to occur in the world, such as peace, inclusion, relatedness, or reconciliation. A possibility is brought into being in the act of declaring it.
For example: if you declare that you are the possibility of peace in the world, though peace may not reign at this moment, the possibility of peace enters the room just because you have walked in the door. Peace here is a future not dependent on achievement; it is a possibility. The possibility is created by our declaration, and then, thankfully, it begins to work on us.
The breakthrough is that we become that possibility, and this is what is transforming. The catch is that possibility can work on us only when we have come to terms with our story. Whatever we hold as our story, which is our version of the past, and from which we take our identity, becomes the limitation to living into a new possibility.
Werner has described this with more precision in personal correspondence:
I suggest that you consider making it clear that it is the future that one lives into that shapes one's being and action in the present. And, the reason that it appears that it is the past that shapes one's being and action in the present is that for most people the past lives in (shapes) their view of the future....
[I]t's only by completing the past (being complete with the past) such that it no longer shapes one's being and action in the present that there is room to create a new future (one not shaped by the past — a future that wasn't going to happen anyhow). Futures not shaped by the past (i.e., a future that wasn't going to happen anyhow) are constituted in language.
In summary, (1) one gets complete with the past, which takes it out of the future (being complete with the past is not to forget the past); (2) in the room that is now available in the future when one's being and action are no longer shaped by the past, one creates a future (a future that moves, touches, and inspires one); (3) that future starts to shape one's being and actions in the present so that they are consistent with realizing that future.
Werner Erhard's way of thinking about language, context, and possibility are key elements in any thinking about authentic transformation. As with the other insights here, they are about a way of being in the world first, and then they can be embodied in concrete actions.
The Putnam Insights: Social Capital and the Well-Being of Community
Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone and amplified the conversation about the role that social capital plays in building community. As one part of his extensive research, he studied a fair number of Italian towns and tried to understand why some were more democratic, were more economically successful, had better health, and experienced better educational achievement.
His findings were startling, for he discovered that the one thing that distinguished the more successful from the less successful towns was the extent of social capital, or widespread relatedness that existed among its citizens. Success as a town was not dependent on the town's geography, history, economic base, cultural inheritance, or financial resources.
Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures — and how we may reconnect. He warns that our stock of social capital — the very fabric of our connections with each other — has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities.
As earlier mentioned about Putnam, geography, history, great leadership, fine programs, economic advantage, and any other factors that we traditionally use to explain success made only a marginal difference in the health of a community. Community well-being simply had to do with the quality of the relationships, the cohesion that exists among its citizens. He calls this social capital.
In the book Better Together, Putnam and coauthor Lewis M. Feldstein explain that "social capital refers to social networks, norms of reciprocity, mutual assistance, and trustworthiness. The central insight of this approach is that social networks have real value both for the people in those networks ... as well as for bystanders. Criminologists, for instance, have shown that the crime rate in a neighborhood is lowered when neighbors know one another well, benefiting even residents who are not themselves involved in neighborhood activities."
They go on to distinguish between "bonding" and "bridging" social capital. Bonding social capital comprises networks that are inward looking, composed of people of like mind. Other social networks "encompass different types of people and tend to be outward looking — bridging social capital." It is primarily the bridging social capital that we are interested in here. As Putnam and Feldstein put it: "a society that has only bonding social capital will ... [be] segregated into mutually hostile camps. So a pluralistic democracy requires lots of bridging social capital, not just the bonding variety."
The Alexander Insights: Aliveness, Wholeness, and Unfolding
Christopher Alexander speaks from the world of architecture, but his thinking applies equally well to the creation of community. He grieves over the fragmented and mechanistic way we currently operate. In The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life, he writes,
In discussing what to do in a particular part of a town, one person thinks poverty is the most important thing. Another person thinks ecology is the most important thing. Another person takes traffic as his point of departure. Another person views the maximization of profit from development as the guiding factor. All these points of view are understood to be individual, legitimate, and inherently in conflict. It is assumed that there is not a unitary view through which these many realities can be combined. They simply get slugged out in the marketplace, or in the public forum.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Community"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Peter Block.
Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Welcome xi
Introduction: The Fragmented Community and Its Transformation 1
Part 1 The Fabric of Community
Chapter 1 Insights into Transformation 11
Chapter 2 Shifting the Context for Community 29
Chapter 3 The Stuck Community 37
Chapter 4 The Restorative Community 49
Chapter 5 Taking Back Our Projections 59
Chapter 6 The Inversion into Citizen 67
Chapter 7 The Transforming Community 77
Part 2 The Alchemy of Belonging
Chapter 8 Leadership Is Convening 89
Chapter 9 The Small Group Is the Unit of Transformation 97
Chapter 10 Questions Are More Transforming Than Answers 105
Summing up Six Conversations 115
Chapter 11 Invitation 117
Chapter 12 The Possibility, Ownership, Dissent, Commitment, and Gifts Conversations 129
Chapter 13 Bringing Hospitality into the World 153
Chapter 14 Designing Physical Space That Supports Community 159
Chapter 15 The End of Unnecessary Suffering 173
In summary The Social Architecture of Building Community 189
Role Models and Resources 199
Background Reading and References 201
Acknowledgments 209
Index 213
About the Author 226
About the Design 228
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