Gifts

Last week, I drove with friends and colleagues from Indianapolis to Cincinnati to attend the three-day Connecting4Community (“C4C”) conference, “a powerful gathering of master and apprentice change agents and social entrepreneurs across sectors and communities, from around the world.” I came for...

When Edd Conboy took over orchestrating the Breaking Bread meals at Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia, he focused on developing as many ways as possible to counteract the constant messages about scarcity that their guests encounter each and every...

When residents are genuinely at the center of community building, a different process unfolds. Relationships become the centerpiece of the work. This is because for residents community building is personal — it’s about their children, their families, their homes, their neighbors and their streets. It...

  Massachusetts Avenue Park was not a place you'd want to take your kids. Before, the small neighborhood park in the heart of Buffalo's West Side was little more than vacant land with a small playground and a crumbling basketball...

“Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollow out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants,” said United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard in 2009. “We need a new...

Alisdair Smith’s experience at an event co-led by thought leaders Peter Block and John McKnight in Cincinnati last year hit him at the cellular level, he says. The Vancouver resident is now planning a similar gathering for two downtown neighbourhoods in his...

Download or listen to John and Peter's March 5 conversation with Mary Nelson on asset-based approaches to building community generally and what makes them effective. Mary is the founder and longtime Director of Bethel New Life, one of the nation's best neighborhood development...

For five years, my family lived in Wilmore, Kentucky, home of Asbury University and Asbury Seminary. Living two blocks from the center of town, I could walk everywhere — to work, the post office, the gym, the hair cutter,...

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese book of 64 oracular readings that reflect enduring wisdom that predates and includes Confucianism and Taoism. The readings consist of archetypal circumstances with guidance on how the individual may act in harmony...