Here’s some advice for the explorer in you who desires to make the world better, particularly the young bright sparks who are just setting out. Trust all your senses.
When your experience compels you to seek something different and your...
In 1995 John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann convened a circle of friends to help them establish the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute at Northwestern University. The Institute was built on John and Jody’s work and research over more than...
Sometimes the significance of a happening revisits you much later. When, several years ago, I found myself in a carload of folks that included pioneer of timebanking, Edgar Cahn, I felt very honoured but certainly didn’t imagine what might...
Conversation with John, Peter and Ross Chapin: Making Space for Community
Download or listen to John and Peter's conversation with architect, community planner and author Ross Chapin, the leader in defining and designing pocket neighborhoods. Ross believes that scale and design...
Not many people have the imagination, intellectual depth and sheer courage to take on an entire profession and demonstrate how it is wrong. Jane Jacobs did. The renegade author and activist — who died in 2006 at age 89...
"Everywhere I go there seems to be a natural curiosity about new ways to solve old problems: what will we eat, what will we drink and where will we stay at night?” says Ruston Seaman, co-founder of New Vision...
Ruth is one of many young girls in the Maasai community, in a remote village in Kenya, where it is common for girls her age to stop going to school after finishing their primary education.
Without further education, young girls...
When asked recently to define social innovation I replied rather off-handedly it’s a combination of the old, the new and the surprising.
It’s not much of a definition but then again the ambiguity might be useful. Definitions all too often...
The road to revolution begins with a walk through the neighbourhood.
That’s what’s sparking for Mike Butler and Dan Benavidez as what they call “the Belonging Revolution” unfolds in their community of Longmont, Colorado.
Since last July, Mike and Dan have...
David Korten began his professional life as a professor at the Harvard Business School on a mission to lift struggling people in Third World nations out of poverty by sharing the secrets of U.S. business success. Yet, after a...