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.
130 POSTS

Life-Giving Journalism

In Part Two of his interview with Peter Pula of Axiom News, Peter explores how the Axiom approach to investigative journalism is to look for stories that have the capacity to give the community life instead of focusing on its...

Putting the Storyteller Back into Journalism

In Part One of Peter's interview with Peter Pula, CEO of Axiom News, they explore how generative journalism differs from mainstream media in framing questions, making space for silence and restoring storytelling to the craft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOxzj4RpXqY Going Further: In Part Two, Peter...

Government Is Not the Problem

Government is not the biggest threat to community life, as it was thought to be when the First Amendment to the Constitution was drafted. John and Peter reflect on how today’s “imperial institutions” of the not-for-profit world and corporate...

Transformational Leadership: Awakening the Power of Community

Peter and VoiceAmerica Business host Kate Ebner have a big conversation that challenges conventional wisdom about leadership — and share what you can do as a citizen to shape our future. Click Here listen. Running time: 58:08

Building a Healthy and Just Community

"Mike Butler integrates theory and his own practice like no one else," Peter said of the conversation he and John had with the Longmont, CO public safety chief, who has a lifetime of experience creating a restorative community and implementing...

How Our Religious Narratives Affect Us

Where are we going to look for our future? Where can we find stories and language of neighborliness? How can we bring narratives of fallibility, faith, relatedness, forgiveness, and apology into the center of our conversations of community? These...

The Future Right Now

Caring for our community and convening citizens to care for their community is difficult work. We are working against the whole tide of the dominant culture which worships individualism, self-interest, and competition. As a culture, we collectively hold the...

Less Leadership and More in the Name of Sophia

Suppose that instead of focusing on the functions and actions of leaders, we reconstruct our basic notion of leadership? Suppose we drew more on Sophia, the Old Testament model of wisdom and gifts of the feminine? This article from imagineONE...

Community Abundance Is Its Gifts

Abundant communities start with making visible the gifts of everyone in the neighborhood—the families, the young people, the old people, the vulnerable people, the troublesome people. Everyone. We do this not out of altruism, but to create the elements...

The Club Is Not the Club

  Home page photo: Schani