Peter Block

In addition to The Abundant Community, co-authored with John McKnight, Peter Block is the author of Flawless Consulting, Community, Stewardship and The Answer to How Is Yes. He serves on the boards of Elementz, a hip hop center for urban youth; Cincinnati Public Radio; and LivePerson. With other volunteers, Peter began A Small Group, whose work is to create a new community narrative and to bring Peter's work on civic engagement into being. Peter's work is in the restoration of communities and creating systems that restore our humanity. He is a partner in Designed Learning, a training company that offers workshops he has designed to build the skills outlined in his books.
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Like-mindedness, Technology and the Risk to Community

We live in a time of growing like-mindedness, which we believe to be a good thing. We want to be with people who have common interests, views, values, you name it. Plus with our new technology, finding and meeting...

Enterprising Economy

The community is the natural nest for hatching new enterprise — it is the birthplace and home of small business, which provides the largest growth in employment. Friends and family often provide the capital and sweat equity to start...

5 Questions to Awaken Your Functional Family

The path to restoring function to the family in a citizen society, not a consumer society, is quite simple. It begins with five questions.   1. What functions can we put back into the hands of young people?  Whether they are our kids...

The Good Life? It’s Close to Home

When family members do not work or live well together we sometimes call the family dysfunctional. We prescribe professional help for the family or advocate for social policies that would support it—child care, parental leave, extended unemployment insurance, debt...

Peter Block: Focusing on What Is Possible

What happens when people choose to focus on what they can achieve to improve their communities, not just on what is wrong? This is the question that leads to successful community change, Peter says, as he talks about how people and...

Peter Block Review: Agenda for a New Economy

In the beginning of Agenda for a New Economy, David Korten says he has written this book “to break the silence and open the unmentioned possibility that it is time to let go of Wall Street and build a...

The Economics of Neighborliness

We cannot build strong neighborhoods and communities while laboring under the principles of traditional economics. The dominant economic thinking begins with a religious belief in scarcity and self-interest. This rules most modern economies and continues to dominate what we...

Faster Than a Speeding Byte

In 1938 the world was in a depression, war was breaking out in Europe and Al Capone, the gangster, ruled at home. Tough times. In the same year there emerged two comic book superheroes, Superman and Batman. They were...

The Bin Laden Effect: In Praise of Our Government

The death of Osama bin Laden completes a painful chapter in our history. The reaction of many is celebration. Some will use this occasion to warn of more fear to come. I, however, would like to take hold of...

Our Abundant Communities

John, Peter and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann explore themes of power and patriarchy; human fallibility and gifts; and accumulation and abundance in building and sustaining community in these uncut videos from their two days at Trinity University, San...