Community
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Peter is also a partner in Designed Learning, a training company he founded that offers workshops that build on the skills outlined in his books. If you would like to learn more about these workshops, contact Designed Learning at 513-524-2227 or visit www.designedlearning.com.
Most relevant to this book, Peter founded A Small Group. Its purpose is to change the dominant narrative of an urban city, Cincinnati in this case, using the six conversations from this book. Elaine and Eric Hansen keep the group going, more than ten years into it. It offers monthly meetings and all-day intensives three times a year in Cincinnati. It also offers online meetings, all of which deepen the conversations in this book. Come if you can.
Peter no longer has an office, but meets people at Lydia’s Café in the Clifton neighborhood in Cincinnati. You can visit his websites: www.peter block.com, www.designedlearning.com, www.asmallgroup.net, www.abundantcommunity.com, and www.restore-commons.com. And he welcomes being contacted at pbi@att.net.
About the Design
I believe that the design and feel of a book is as important as its content. There are too many books where I have had to fight the type and interior design in order to extract the content. Small type, crowded pages, no white space, invasive footnotes, no transitions or breathing spaces. These visual qualities in a book neglect the experience of the reader. As if the reader was not important, only the ideas. Leigh McLellan has given her life and talent to book design. She has created a very elegant form for this book and I invited her to comment on the thinking behind her creation:
The title of the book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, suggests both structure and accessibility, a concept enhanced by Peter’s open, conversational style. Also, Peter was concerned with judicious use of white space in the design.
The feeling of structure is expressed by the rules (horizontal lines) placed on the part and chapter openings, giving shape to the beginning of each section. On the chapter opening pages, I indented the first lines of the introductory paragraphs to give the reader a little door of white space into the text, an invitation to enter. This indent also creates a more open, informal appearance. To further this and to lend a touch of elegance, I also added space between the letters in the titles and headings.
Quotes are contained in boxes at the edge of the text to lend interest to the page and to give the eye an occasional rest. They also pull the eye outward, momentarily expanding the reading area.
For the text type, I chose a crisp, contemporary face, aptly named Utopia. I complimented the squarishness of the letter shapes with Tiepolo Bold for the titles, and selected sans serif Frutiger for contrast in handling the different kinds of text in the book, especially the introductory paragraph and the Example text. The title and halftitle pages are set with Frutiger capitals as a lead-in from the san serif cover type. The large dot on both pages reflects the circular cover motif.
Book design in sum: structure, elegance, consistency, an organic whole in which every part pulls and pushes every other part with both tension and harmony. Each element must be distinct yet recognizably related. Interconnected, like members of a community, as Peter so beautifully expressed in his Welcome.
—Leigh McLellan
www.abundantcommunity.com
Visit the website developed by Peter Block and John McKnight to showcase the work featured in their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.
• Discover the methods that community-minded people around the world use to discover new ways to cooperate in fulfilling the productive functions of communities.
• Learn the latest thinking about what it means to live in an Abundant Community.
• Read blog posts contributed by social innovators who are changing the narrative about their community.
• Listen to Peter and John talk with people who are creating the kind of community that has the power to reweave the social fabric undone by our consumerist culture.
• Watch videos of examples of people and neighborhoods that have found practical ways to use local gifts and talents to create a future that works for all.
NEW!
Community Role Models and Resources
To mark the publication of the second edition of Community: The Structure of Belonging, The Abundant Community website now features a completely updated Role Models and Resources list from Peter’s book, newly designed for easy access and regular updating.
Share your neighborhood’s story at www.abundantcommunity.com and sign up for The Abundant Community newsletter announcing the periodic online / dial-up conversations Peter and John have with community-building pioneers from across the country and around the world.
www.restore-commons.com
Citizen-leaders are inventing ways for themselves and their neighbors to be safe, produce a just economy, produce good health, produce and distribute a secure and local food supply, care for people on the margin, care for the land, and do a better job of raising our children. These are the measures of care for the common good.
Building the social fabric of our culture required to support the commons is a long-term undertaking. It starts with seeing the nature of the modern epidemic of isolation and then constructing ways of reversing it. There is a need to shift the thinking, narratives, and practices that produce this isolation.
An initiative of Peter Block and friends, Restore Commons aims to assemble the principles, practices, and tools for this restorative transformation, which is well under way.
Restore Commons is designed to be an online gathering place for stories and radical ideas strong enough to build the social capital and engaged community required to restore the common good. The topics include:
• an alternative economy
• alternative journalism
• neighborhoods, architecture, and space that connect us
• voices from the faith community who are reinterpreting text in powerful and surprising ways
Visit the website to find examples and discover thought leaders sharing inverted and humanistic thinking through videos, podcasts, stories, and recommended reading.
Stay connected!
• Sign up for the free newsletter at www.restore-commons.com
• Engage on Facebook and Twitter: @RestoreCommons
Peter Block’s Designed Learning continues to lead the industry in providing workplace business partnering, leadership, and consulting skills training. At the center of the world of organizational change for over 30 years, Designed Learning has trained over 1,000,000 people in hundreds of companies worldwide using Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting® workshops.
Based on Peter’s best-selling Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, these highly interactive workshops teach participants the skills that will allow them to effectively partner with peers and those above them in order to have their expertise used and recommendations implemented even in situations where they have little or no control. The workshops teach personally powerful ways to be more authentic, express wants, give support, disarm objections, and be more confident in partnership roles, both professionally and personally.
We want to have a conversation with you. Give us a call or visit our website at www.designedlearning to learn more about Designed Learning and Flawless Consulting workshops, the only workshops designed and continually developed by Peter Block.
Phone: 513-524-2227 or 1-866-770-2227 (Toll-free)
Email: administrator@designedLearning.com
Also by Peter Block with John McKnight
The Abundant Community
Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods
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 the 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 satis faction 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.
Paperback, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-60994-081-2
PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-60509-626-1
ePub ebook ISBN 978-1-60509-627-8
Also by Peter Block
Stewardship
Choosing Service over Self-Interest, Second Edition
Stewardship remains as relevant and radical today as when it was first published in 1993. Block asserts that a fundamental shift in how we distribute power, privilege, and the control of money can transform every part of an organization for the better. This edition features a new introduction by Block and a new chapter on applying stewardship to the common good of the wider community.
Paperback, 312 pages, ISBN 978-1-60994-822-1
PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-60994-823-8
ePub ebook ISBN 978-1-60994-824-5
The Answer to How Is Yes
Acting on What Matters
Modern culture’s worship of “how-to” pragmatism has turned us into instruments of efficiency and commerce—but we’re doing more and more about things that mean less and less. Peter Block raises our awareness of the trade-offs we’ve made in the name of practicality and offers hope for a way of life in which we’re motivated not by what “works” but by things that truly matter— idealism, intimacy, depth, and engagement.
Paperback, 216 pages, ISBN 978-1-57675-271-5
PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-60509-394-9
ePub ebook ISBN 978-1-60994-040-9
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