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Author Biographies :: Peter Block
Peter Block
Peter BlockIn 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.
Articles by this Author…
Measuring and Evaluating Community Initiatives
Posted on April 22, 2013 in Posts
Highlights from Peter's April 16 online/dial-up conversation with Tom Dewar, co-director of the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change and long-time member of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute.… read more »
How to Use Local Assets to Make Your Community Effective
Posted on March 6, 2013 in Stories
Highlights from Peter and John's March 5 online/dial-up conversation with Mary Nelson, the founder and longtime Director of Bethel New Life, one of the nation's best neighborhood development organizations.… read more »
Safety and Security: A Neighborhood Necessity
Posted on January 7, 2013 in Posts
An excerpt on safety and security from John and Peter's book. They say that safety and security, health, the well-being of children, the environment and the land, an enterprising economy, food and care for those on the margin are the seven neighborhood necessities that are fulfilled not by acting as consumers but as citizens of an abundant community creating our own future with our neighbors.… read more »
Life-Giving Journalism
Posted on December 17, 2012 in Posts
Peter explores with Peter Pula of Axiom News how Axiom is remaking journalism by looking for stories that have the capacity to give the community life.… read more »
Government Is Not the Problem
Posted on November 6, 2012 in Posts
John and Peter reflect on how all the talk that government is the problem actually deflects our attention from the privatization that now runs our culture.… read more »
The Future Right Now
Posted on May 23, 2012 in Posts
Convening citizens to care for their community goes against a culture that worships individualism, self-interest and competition. Something new is required, and the future of leadership exists where people like Mike Butler are reconstructing the role of traditional systems.… read more »
Less Leadership and More in the Name of Sophia
Posted on May 17, 2012 in Posts
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? The emerging form of leadership for the common good may be to have as little leadership as possible and to be more interested in the actions and role of ordinary people.… read more »
Community Abundance Is Its Gifts
Posted on April 26, 2012 in Posts
In sharing our gifts in associational life, we have the power to produce the future we envision. We are not consumers. We are not clients. We are citizens with the power to make powerful communities.… read more »
The Club Is Not the Club
Posted on April 19, 2012 in Posts
There's more to your local book club, dog club or poker club than books, dogs or cards. Peter reminds us of the power such associations can bring into neighborhood life. All we have to do is ask.… read more »
The Point Is the Place
Posted on March 23, 2012 in Posts
The more we know and care about the place where we are, the more likely we are to do the functions that neighborhoods are meant to do.… read more »
Fallibility: The Value of Imperfection
Posted on January 31, 2012 in Posts
The capacities of an abundant community are the core elements that need to be visible and manifest to create functional families and neighborhoods. One of the capacities of an abundant community is the ability to accept people’s fallibility.… read more »
More Health, Less Management, Please
Posted on December 2, 2011 in Posts
Industry solutions to a health care system that already suffers from over–management suggest we provide even more management. True health care reform will occur when we acknowledge that 85% of our health is in the hands of the individual and the community.… read more »
Comment: How Wall Street Occupied America by Bill Moyers
Posted on November 11, 2011 in Posts
The Gilded Age is back with a vengeance, Bill Moyers says in a post drawn from his November 21 article for The Nation.… read more »
The Fall of JoePa and a Return to Common Sense
Posted on November 11, 2011 in Posts
There are three ways for us to respond to the Joe Paterno story: blame the individual, blame the institution, or seek community. The costs of the competitive culture we have created are not only that we have let the winners get away with too much for too long; we also have marginalized the commons and devalued the benefits of cooperation in providing for our community's health, education, and well-being.… read more »
The Economy Is in Our Hands, We Just Don’t Know It
Posted on November 2, 2011 in Posts
Six things we can do to reclaim the economy and put it into our own hands.… read more »
Is There Too Much Parenting?
Posted on September 8, 2011 in Posts
Is "positive parenting" all that useful, or could it be more beneficial to back off our efforts to be such active managers of our children's future?… read more »
What in the Name of Reform
Posted on August 8, 2011 in Posts
Most of our current efforts at reform are at best efforts to make things a little better. Serious reform -- in education, health care, government or the economy -- requires shifts in the way neighbors and families relate to and engage with one another… read more »
Six Conversations That Matter: A Quick Review
Posted on July 5, 2011 in Posts
Six conversations designed to open the community to an alternative future… read more »
Like-mindedness, Technology and the Risk to Community
Posted on June 30, 2011 in Posts
Our technological quest for the like-minded and familiar keeps us from experiencing real community and caring for the common good.… read more »
Enterprising Economy
Posted on June 23, 2011 in Posts
A connected and competent community has a vision, culture and commitment that can uniquely assure our sense of well-being and happiness. This source of satisfaction is complete in and of itself — it is not dependent on systems or our next purchase.… read more »
5 Questions to Awaken Your Functional Family
Posted on June 9, 2011 in Posts
Taken to heart, these five questions build community, develop neighborhood competence and give us tools that cannot be purchased from professional service providers.… read more »
The Good Life? It’s Close to Home
Posted on June 8, 2011 in Posts
Rebuilding families and neighborhoods around the gifts each of us offers… read more »
Peter Block Review: Agenda for a New Economy
Posted on June 3, 2011 in Posts
David Korten's "Agenda for a New Economy" is a powerful antidote to the conventional wisdom that has us convinced that what ails us is good for us.… read more »
The Economics of Neighborliness
Posted on May 25, 2011 in Posts
"There is no wealth but life," said Victorian philosopher and artist John Ruskin, foreshadowing the growing movement to have economics concerned with abundance and serving the interests of local communities.… read more »
Faster Than a Speeding Byte
Posted on May 20, 2011 in Posts
The movie "The Social Network" strikes a chord in all of us who long to feel less powerless and more connected to human communities in the Digital Age… read more »
The Bin Laden Effect: In Praise of Our Government
Posted on May 2, 2011 in Posts
The death of Osama bin Laden inspires a moment of gratitude for those who serve the public.… read more »
A Future for Journalism: The Story of What’s Working
Posted on April 11, 2011 in Posts
An encouraging sign that a "new" journalism can speak to the possibilities held by our urban centers.… read more »
The Latest Executive Tool: The Weed Whacking Golf Driver
Posted on March 28, 2011 in Posts
The private sector is good at certain things, and we need those systems for that. Let us just not be lulled into believing that democracy and care for the commons, including our neighbors and neighborhood, are safe in those same hands.… read more »
Biding My Time
Posted on March 14, 2011 in Posts
No time. This common argument against neighborhood building should not be taken at face value.… read more »
The Nervous American Empire or Raise Your Hands Over Your Head and Don’t Move
Posted on February 10, 2011 in Posts
America is more vulnerable since 9/11, and not for the reasons you might think.… read more »
A Real Community Learning Center
Posted on January 25, 2011 in Posts
With a little local help, schools could be the place for building neighborhood relationships and be center for children and neighbors to become more useful to each other.… read more »
Seeing Ahead
Posted on January 4, 2011 in Posts
Social invention pioneer Al Etmanski asked me this question recently: What would you like to see made visible in 2011?… read more »
Home Economics Redux
Posted on November 15, 2010 in Posts
We now use the term “dysfunctional family” for a reason. In the evolution of the consumer society, the family has lost much of its use or function.… read more »
The Wrong Conversation about Health Care
Posted on October 13, 2010 in Posts
The current health care debate is a conversation that is not going to make us any healthier. It is the wrong conversation.… read more »
If You're Not Fast You're Food
Posted on September 20, 2010 in Posts
Modernist beliefs have reached their limits. What we are seeking and discovering is a new identity for ourselves, one that replaces the assumptions of modernism with a worldview that values cooperation, abundance and measures of well being that have nothing to do with material wealth.… read more »
The Future of Community
Posted on August 30, 2010 in Posts
What is the relationship between electronic technology and community? Does the technology build community and relationships or become a substitute for them?… read more »
Kibble and Grist
Posted on August 14, 2010 in Posts
Thoughts from and to the community-minded… read more »
Art in Community
Posted on July 26, 2010 in Posts
The most businesslike, intellectual or problem solving gathering needs an open mind, an open heart and a trusting network of relationships to achieve its purpose. Participating in art does this. It engages us in our humanity and is essential to creating any alternative future we have in mind.… read more »
New Measures of Better Off
Posted on July 12, 2010 in Posts
Our children will be better off than we are, but not because they will make more money.… read more »
News to Us
Posted on July 1, 2010 in Posts
What’s news? Peter invites us to reconstruct our thinking about what is newsworthy. News that is worthy builds community.… read more »
The Power of Positive Deviance: Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin, Richard Pascale
Posted on July 1, 2010 in Posts
The Power of Positive Deviance describes a way of thinking and acting that has relevance for anyone who cares about their community and its gifts and capacities.… read more »
Win, Lose or Draw
Posted on June 24, 2010 in Posts
A life of satisfaction starts with understanding how our love of competition feeds our dissatisfaction. We have romanticized competition as the natural state. We treat cooperation as the exception. Cooperation is not a denial of the toughness of the real world, it just reframes our effort. All we need to do is lose interest in competition and declare that cooperation is the natural state.… read more »
Al Etmanski
Posted on June 21, 2010 in Stories
Al Etmanski is one of North America's best social inventors.… read more »
The Economy: Under New Ownership
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
Harnessing and Harvesting “The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People”
by April Doner
by Edd Conboy
Measuring and Evaluating Community Initiatives
by Peter Block, Tom Dewar
Resident-Centered Community Building: What Makes It Different?
by The Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation, The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change
Green Housing: In Buffalo, It's Not Just for Rich People Anymore
Why Unions Are Going Into the Co-op Business
by Amy Dean
How to Use Local Assets to Make Your Community Effective
by Nancy Sleeth
"The Well" ~ A Symbol of Healthy Community
Growing Global Divisiveness Gets Disrupted
by Mary Nelson
Three Steps to Building a Better Block
by Gerard Ee
Strengthening Government and Community through Genuine Partnerships
by Jim Diers
Lessons in Community from Chicago's South Side
Safety and Security: A Neighborhood Necessity
by Peter Block
by Dan Duncan
Community Building through Gifts
Six Conversations That Matter: A Quick Review
by Peter Block
