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John McKnight

John McKnight

We Are the Authority

John McKnight -
Chicago's Westside Health Authority started a quarter century ago when faced with declining government investment in healthcare neighbors asked, "What can WE do, and do it our way?" Created from the idea that citizens are the best authority on their own...
John McKnight

The Real Disability Is Disconnection

John McKnight -
Pat Worth had been labeled retarded as a child and was living on a park bench when he decided to organize people who shared his experience. The organization he formed is now known as People First. In this video post,...
John McKnight

The Institutional Assumption

John McKnight -
The “institutional assumption” — for example, thinking in terms of medical care, clinics, insurance, outreach instead of health — is the most consistent failure in our thinking about change. If we start by looking at the condition we're interested in,...
John McKnight

Taking Back Our Children

John McKnight -
John McKnight

Learning from Other Neighborhoods

John McKnight -
 
John McKnight

Community Abundance Is Its Gifts

John McKnight -
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...
John McKnight

This Land Is My Land

John McKnight -
  Related: Dufferin Grove Park: The Bake Ovens Building Community with Portable Brick Ovens Wood-fired Communal Oven In A Park: Why Bother? (Jutta Mason, The Project for Public Spaces)   Home page photo: Friends of Dufferin Park
John McKnight

Citizen Cop Out

John McKnight -
Join the conversation . . .  How would you organize a gathering of citizens to keep them from copping out?     Video by Peter Block. Home page photo: Jennifer Kumar
John McKnight

Fallibility: The Value of Imperfection

John McKnight -
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.   A conspicuous...
John McKnight

Resolving to Rediscover Entertainment in the New Year

John McKnight -
  The American Academy of Pediatrics recently released a report urging that children under age two not be allowed to watch any shows on television, or on iPads, smartphones or computers. Among other reasons, the report notes that the noise...
John McKnight

How to Teach Children to Lose by Winning

John McKnight -
In his brilliant book No Contest: The Case against Competition, author Alfie Kohn defines competition as the process by which for me to win, you must lose. Our children’s lives are filled with the competitive experience. Most of their activities...
John McKnight

Capacity Building Beyond Community Services

John McKnight -
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...
John McKnight

How to Reduce the National Debt by 30 Trillion Dollars

John McKnight -
Anthropologists remind us that the manifestations of a community’s culture are its food, language, arts, and faith. These are the ways that have interwoven through time so that a community knows how to survive in its place. Because cultural ways...
John McKnight

Lifting the Burdens of Parenting

John McKnight -
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...
John McKnight

Why Families Fall Apart

John McKnight -
One day, when my mother was in her 70’s, she told me a story about how things had changed in her small town since she was a girl. She said, When I was a girl, things were very different. When...
John McKnight

It Takes A Village to Educate a Child

John McKnight -
Throughout the United States, local school districts are cutting back on teachers and curriculum while increasing class size.  With our current economy, it doesn’t appear that this trend will soon be reversed. This grim prospect depends upon whether we have...
John McKnight

Enterprising Economy

John McKnight -
The community is the natural nest for hatching new enterprise — it is the birthplace and home of small business, which provides the largest growth in employment. Friends and family often provide the capital and sweat equity to start...
John McKnight

Support Community-Building Clergy

John McKnight -
A convivial friend, Dan Grego, says that the future of our country depends upon whether we can learn how to help each other, outside of the market. One of the most significant reasons that we don’t help each other in...
John McKnight

Rallying the Strength of Community

John McKnight -
“The Clearness Committee is not a cure-all,” says Parker Palmer in the excerpt from A Hidden Wholeness we posted recently in The Therapeutic Neighborhood. “But for the right person, with the right issue, it is a powerful way to...
John McKnight

5 Questions to Awaken Your Functional Family

Peter Block -
The path to restoring function to the family in a citizen society, not a consumer society, is quite simple. It begins with five questions.   1. What functions can we put back into the hands of young people?  Whether they are our kids...
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Friends & NeighborsTim Schlak -

The Biggest Question You Can Ask in Life

A Buddhist teacher once nudged me along the path by rephrasing a question my mind kept posing to itself....
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