Book Review of Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
In my reading I have come upon three very powerful books that are awakening fresh insight and unlimited potential regarding most of our significant current challenges. The first is Community Building, edited by my good friend, Kazimierz Gozdz with articles by Peter Senge, Michael Ray and others. The second is The Abundant Community by John McKnight and Peter Block. And the third is Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block. If you can only read one, begin with the last one by Peter Block.
In it he describes the power of belonging and being needed. We have outsourced so many of our needs to “professionals” that so many of us have lost our sense of being able to contribute meaningfully. By delegating responsibilities out to professionals, an unintended consequence is our loss of full purpose and self actualization. For example, we have delegated teachers to educate the young, while doctors and nurses have been given responsibility to keep us well. Police and fire fighters are supposed to keep us safe. Our elected representatives are given responsibility to govern. And on and on. What has gotten lost in the shuffle is our own responsibility to own our part in each challenge. For example, no one can keep me healthy if I don’t assume responsibility for pro-active wellness. One of the most important dimensions of living a meaningful life is to discover and grow our many gifts making life better for all.
In the second section, he contrasts stuck communities with redemptive communities.
In a stuck community:
- "We are a community of problems to be solved. Those who can best articulate the problems and the solution dominate the conversation.
- The future is defined by the interplay of self-interest, dependent on the accountability of leaders, and controlled by a small number of wealthy and powerful people, commonly lumped into the category we call “they.”
- Community action is aimed at eliminating the sources of our fear. We aim at a set of needs and deficiencies. In order to eliminate fear and respond to the neediness of our people, we try harder at what we have been doing all long. We lock down neighborhoods, build more prisons, and reduce tolerance to zero. We call for better programs, more expertise, more funding, better leadership, stronger consequences, and more protection. We are committed to trying harder at what is not working.
In the restorative community we move from:
-Conversations about problems to ones of possibility.
- Conversations about fear and fault to ones of gifts, generosity, and abundance.
- A bet on law and oversight to a preference for building the social fabric and choosing accountability.
- Seeing the corporation and systems as central to seeing associational life as central.
- A focus on leaders to a focus on citizens.
All this moves us from having faith in professionals and those in positions of authority to having faith in our neighbors. It changes our mindset from valuing what is efficient to valuing the importance of belonging.” (Excerpts from Chapters 3 & 4)
Block shines a bright light on a huge gap in our current society. Educators can’t give us a great education without the help and support of parents and the person doing the learning. The most important gift we can give ourselves is to choose to become an engaged student for life. As someone who is profoundly dyslexic, I found this to be a huge challenge. All the traditional ways of learning were not my most fluent. And yet I learned in the second grade that if I could find a classmate who was struggling to learn a subject (say it was math) and I could listen for that person, then I could learn successfully. I am a social learner and I learn best in community. Block explains that when we separate the art of learning from the process of learning, our spirit withers. And each of us have unlimited gifts to contribute to everyone around us when we begin to step beyond the formal roles we have assigned to each other.
He gives a fascinating example of a counseling center who gave up Medicaid funding because it required them to name and place a disease on the head of each person. The director, Tricia Burke, believed that labels can be toxic and limiting. For example, a program for battered women was renamed Women of Worth. When other mental health clients were given responsibility to plan and organize how they would spend their free time in a day program, they began to thrive out of the sense of purpose, shared gifts and recognition that this huge challenge presented. Some began to teach police officers what it felt like to hear voices and hallucinate, a piece of information critical to their role of responding appropriately. They taught Ohio state legislators that people who have mental illness are much more than their illnesses and have a great deal to give back to the community. They organized a wellness activity and volunteered their services to an animal shelter…all of which grew personal self esteem for each participant.
One concept that especially spoke to me was about romanticizing leadership. It is so tempting to delegate all the complex challenges we face to our president, the CEO, whoever holds the highest position. Yet they will be unsuccessful without the good ideas, energy and collaborative support of all those within our communities. One person can make a huge difference and the discovery of personal possibility by rising to help others is the redemptive strength of self actualization.
I encourage you to enjoy your own discoveries by reading Peter’s new book and then begin the journey of inviting those around you to rediscover the sense of purpose that comes from creative collaboration. For too long we have huddled together to be critical of each other, and pointed fingers at all those in authority. Hopefully we each have known the pain of failure and have some compassion for having taken on a huge challenge only to fall short. But I am also hoping that each of us have dared to rise to a challenge that we could not turn away from, asked for help from others and discovered the break throughs when we dared to believe in the impossible and banded together to not stop until we have achieved our shared vision. This is why and how servant leadership is so powerful. When each of us chooses to become both a leader where we see opportunities to lead, and a follower who supports the success of those around us, in this spirit our lives and communities will thrive.
Get ready to discover new ways to think about community and be inspired to take action!
Ann McGee-Cooper
Leah soon found that the easy part was lining up the vendors to come while the hard part was dealing with the City of Dallas. She kept running up against different stories as to what permits she needed, only to finally learn that the permit she was told to get didn’t actually exist. There were clear regulations for the large Dallas Farmers’ Market but all sorts of contradictory rules for the smaller ones. covering such things as health insurance, vendor fees and number of vendors. Leah eventually partnered up with some of the other smaller community markets to go before the city and change the regulations for these smaller markets. All along the way, she had the support and advice from Ed and her other Celebration partners. 
