Land/Environment

About every six weeks for the last five years, John and Peter have hosted online / dial-up conversations with community-building pioneers as their guests. For their February 20, 2018 dialog they invited Paul Sparks, a leading voice in the growing...

How a few plants, a mural, and less pavement could bring more to a neighborhood than one big ministry. Parish Portrait: Mt Scott-Arleta, Portland, OR with B.D. Dormaier from Parish Collective on Vimeo. Home page image: Ron Dunnigton

Government innovation isn’t your main problem. It’s government’s. After many years of unsuccessfully peddling the processes of social innovation to governments across Canada I’ve learned: Not to peddle process. Instead to focus on proposing bold, workable solutions to problems they...

At a recent meeting with city managers, I was struck by how universally the focus of relationships with community was “problems.” Certainly, problems are one way of defining a part of the kinds of relationships government or any institution...

The following is an excerpt from The Revolution Where You Live: Stories from a 12,000 Mile Journey Through a New America. The real change we need to stop the social and ecological unraveling can be found in the neighborhoods and cities,...

YES! Magazine co-founder and editor at large Sarah van Gelder talks about her 12,000-mile journey to find out what people are doing in their communities about poverty, inequality, the climate crisis, and racism.   Related:   I Saw the Revolution in So...

One way of classifying associations is in terms of whether or not they are space-bounded. The greatest number of associations are not space-bound. However, our focus has been upon those associations where a neighborhood or small town provides the...

The Abundant Community Initiative is catching on, with municipalities across North America expressing interest in connecting neighbours. Howard Lawrence, co-founder of the Asset-Based Neighbourhood Organizing Association, says many cities have a long-standing relationship with Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) and the Abundant Community Initiative is a...

There has been a great deal of effort to persuade local institutions to reach out to the local citizenry and to engage them in participating in decision making. This process usually leaves the decision as to which decisions citizens...