About
We need our neighbors and a community to be healthy, produce jobs, protect the land and care for the elderly and those on the margin.
Our Commitment
We are committed to supporting the capacity of citizens to produce their own financial, relational and environmental well-being. Every neighborhood has all the gifts required to raise our children, be safe, carve out a living, be healthy, care for the vulnerable and end the isolation of all, especially the elderly. The time is right for this to occur, and all that is required is to welcome the stranger and resist the loud drumbeat of certainty. A little faith doesn’t hurt either.
What We Do
Conversations with John and Peter
We hold free recurring video conferences with social innovators who are demonstrating that the future always exists in the present. We want to make it easy to learn about their work and how to apply it to our own communities. We support the work of community-building pioneers around the globe and encourage relationships among people who care about nurturing the structures that will allow local gifts to be widely shared.
To learn more and register for the next Conversation with John and Peter, go here.
AbundantCommunity.com
We are a place to visit. To read and hear stories of action. More valuable than your daily newspaper. A way to learn about citizen-led action that illuminates a new direction, away from the dominant consumerist and dependency-producing habits that we thought we had to purchase. Communities forever have known how to produce family and neighborhood functions such as raising children, building healthy local economies and caring for people on the margin. This website invites you into this possibility.
The Book
We are discovering that it takes a village to do more than raise a child. It is the key to a satisfying life. It turns out we need our neighbors and a community to be healthy, produce jobs, protect the land, and care for the elderly and those on the margin.
John McKnight
John L. McKnight was raised a traveling Ohioan, having lived in seven neighborhoods and small towns in the eighteen years before he left to attend Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. There, he had the good fortune to be educated by a faculty dedicated to preparing students for effective citizenship. He graduated into the U.S. Navy, where he had three years of “postgraduate” education in Asia during the Korean War.
Peter Block
Peter Block was born in Chicago and spent most of his early years in the Midwest. After college, he went to New Jersey and was involved in the early days of creating the field of organization development. This entailed some years at Exxon Research and Engineering Company and then the formation of a consulting firm with Tony Petrella. Marvin Weisbord joined in 1971, and the firm did pretty well until, Block says, “we all got into our sixties and either retired or moved in other directions.”
