The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods [Paperback]

We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us.

The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community.

This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all.Welcome
Introduction
The Elements of Satisfaction
The Universal Properties

Part One: The Shift from Citizen to Consumer
Chapter 1:The Limits of Consumption
Chapter 2:What Did We Lose and Where Did It Go?
Chapter 3: The Effects of Living in a Consumer World

Part Two: Choosing a Satisfied Life
Chapter 4:The Abundant Community
Chapter 5:Community Abundance in Action

Part Three: Creating Abundance
Chapter 6:Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods
Chapter 7:The Power of Connectors
Notes
Resources
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Authors“The Abundant Community is a book that reminds us that our greatest strength as a people comes from the gifts of caring, aware communities and neighborhoods.”
—Frances Strickland, educational psychologist and First Lady of Ohio

“Peter and John provocatively challenge us as individuals to understand the power of the individual and the potential of our work together. They also suggest local governmentl32