Association

Bob Stilger has a forty year relationship with Japan and, in the wake of the massive destruction since March 2011, has returned to work around the country as a witness and listener. In this recent post from his blog,...

I wrote this piece for the very first issue of the new YES! and it struck me as worth revisiting. What's your take? Do you see possibilities in a time of chaos? There are times in history when two eras—with...

Local governments can create effective community change. How? By becoming community engagement organizations and bringing the community together — residents, associations, nonprofits, the business community and government — to act collectively as coproducers of their community's well-being. Using results-based accountability (RBA) coupled...

Typically, institutions committed to a community’s well-being begin by asking what’s wrong with a place. But the three thought leaders to join an upcoming Memphis conversation — John McKnight, Peter Block and Walter Brueggemann — choose not to take the...

Government is not the biggest threat to community life, as it was thought to be when the First Amendment to the Constitution was drafted. John and Peter reflect on how today’s “imperial institutions” of the not-for-profit world and corporate...

When we hear the term “sustainable communities” in general it refers to the Triple Bottom Line of Social, Economic and Environmental interests at the “community scale.” For our purposes in discussing sustainable (or resilient) communities, the focus is on...

“I get the jitters asserting that helping can be harmful,” says Maurice Lim Miller, founder and CEO of the Family Independence Initiative, in his Huffington Post blog post When Helping Doesn’t Help. Lim Miller takes John McKnight’s well-known position that...

Thank you for joining me on this journey.  The last several weeks have been eye-opening as we have intentionally set out to meet and know our neighbors.  Honestly assessing our fears and assumptions has led us to make changes...