Jean Durel, Jim and J’Ann Allen will share their perspectives and lead a discussion on Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging at the Allens’ home on 4519 Oakland Avenue in the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood. For more information on the book, see below.
We meet on Sunday 14 October for a potluck beginning at 6:00 p.m., and our friends sharing commences at 6:45.
Please bring a friend or two!
Mark
Community – The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
Overall Premise
Build the social fabric and transform the isolation within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.
Shift our conversations from the problems of community to the possibility of community.
Commit to create a future distinct from the past.
Operating Guidelines
Social fabric is created one room at a time, the one we are in at the moment.
It is formed out of the questions “Whom do we want in the room?” and “What is the new conversation that we want to occur?”
The key to a new future is to focus on gifts, on associational life, and on the insight that all transformation occurs through language.
Each step has to embody a quality of aliveness, and strategy evolves in an organic way.
The essence of creating an alternative future comes from citizen-to-citizen engagement that constantly focuses on the well-being of the whole.
We have all the capacity, expertise, and financial resources that an alternative future requires.
The small group is the unit of transformation and the container for the experience of belonging.
For a PDF file of a thoroughsummary of the book, go here.
