Raising Children

Imagine a “gifts fair” where neighbors share their knowledge and skills with their neighbors. Need a garment hemmed? Want some help preparing a presentation? Looking for gardening advice? Getting people together to work on anything from fixing a flat bicycle...

Check out Good Tree Village Cohousing's blog at http://goodtreevillage.org/2011/11/20/small-steps-to-creating-community/. A recent post features a 100 neighbors website and a story on neighbors who connected their yards to create an urban oasis as two small and effective ways of building community. Photo: Good Tree...

If you believe the news, the future of the economy is in the hands of President Obama, Chairman Bernanke of the Federal Reserve, Prime Minister Cameron in Britain,  Italian and Greek debt, the G5, BRIC, and everyone else but...

On November 9, Joe Paterno, legendary football coach of Penn State, got fired. His boss, the president of Penn State, also got fired. The reason they got fired was that eleven years ago, when they were told that their...

In this segment of his video interview Capacity Building Beyond Community Services with The Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities, John talks about some of the reasons why social services systems can only provide "service," not care. In other segments he goes into the meaning of...

For many people, “parenting” is a word describing a burden. Usually, they’re correct because they’re carrying an unprecedented load, heaped on their backs throughout the twentieth century. First, many modern married couples were slowly detached from supporting relationships. They live...

We are in the midst of a global transformative change in what it means to be a "Community," and in particular, a Sustainable Community. At the heart of this change is the growing recognition that personal, social, and cultural...

I live in Lake Forest Park—a town of about 12,000 people on the very northern edge of Seattle, Washington. That we are a town at all is an accident.  Lake Forest Park began as a real estate development located...

I had the pleasure of interviewing John about how we understand and enact community within the framework of our lives that exist in place-based communities, taking into account the complexities of our simultaneous allegiances to multiple communities. John also...

I want to open a conversation about parenting. Not about what is good or bad parenting, but rather about the idea that today’s obsession about parenting has gone too far. My qualifications for this discussion are a bit thin. Most...