Abundant Communities

In 2010, Peter Block and John McKnight combined and refreshed their analytical insight into communities as the solution, not the problem. “A neighborhood,” they wrote, “can raise a child, provide security, sustain our health, secure our income, and care for vulnerable people.”¹⁵ But they see this insight contrasting more and more with the dominant paradigm: “People hold to romantic beliefs that a system can produce care, a doctor can produce health, a school can educate a child, the police can keep us safe, and that therapists and social workers can wash away our cares and woes.”¹⁶ What Block and McKnight believe is that each of these outcomes is within the power of communities—the power that comes from identifying and connecting a community's assets.