Community: The Structure of Belonging Kindle Edition

I believe this book is a must-read for those of us who work to transform community:

It gives us a common language for talking about what makes community transformation different from human service/government planning and programs.

It integrates many important strands of transformation thinking, making transformation feel more accessible.

It helps us see what transformation looks like and connects that vision to concrete practice.

Community: The Structure of Belonging is divided into two sections. The first is titled The Fabric of Community and is for me what makes this book so important. In this section Peter provides the "why" and the "what" of community transformation. (Those of us who normally skip straight to the "how" should read Peter's previous book, The Answer to How is Yes.) In this section, we learn to not continue repeating the program, system, service problem solving that keeps us from really restoring community. We learn what transformation is, what it means to be a citizen. If we really get the message of this section, we start to BE community transformer, not just DO community building.

The second section is The Alchemy of Belonging. This is the tool kit for doing community transformation. Convening, invitation, small groups, forming the questions, holding the conversations of possibility, ownership, dissent commitment and gifts are covered here. This section expands the information that has been available on Peter's website that was developed and used in Cincinnati by A Small Group (as in Margaret Mead's axiom, "Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. In fact it is the only thing that ever has.")

In the back are two extra gifts: Book at a Glance, a 10-page sentence outline of the entire book, and Role Models and Resources, which expands the concept of an annotated bibliography and offers countless opportunities for further reading and learning.

The gift of this book is a strong set of principles and usable instructions for restoring community. The challenge is to our willingness to stop what we are doing and learn what will lead us to the communities we desire.

The restoration of community is a vital need for us today. Block suggests that the first step to community is to quit thinking of community as a problem and instead to define it as conversations -- conversations of possibility. Block sees the role of leadership as convening small groups, which he sees as the unit of transformation. In starting the conversations in these groups, the leader needs to remember that questions are more transforming than answers; curiosity more useful than advice. He explains what questions have power and what questions squelch power. He also explains how to invite people, how to facilitate accountability and ownership, and the importance of physical space for meetings and how to design it. Having dealt with these issues a long time myself, I was pleased to see some of my wisdom validated and also to learn important new wrinkles about small groups and community.

I was inspired by the ideas on community building, but a little skeptical about the effectiveness of the conversations. Then we convened a church gathering around the ownership conversation and we were amazed at the power of the questions. We began a path to transformation! We intend to gather around all six conversations. A new day is emerging.

I decided to read "Community: The Structure of Belonging" as we strive to build better community within the retail company where I work and am responsible for training and developing our employees. As many retailers and other far-flung organizations may experience, there is sometimes an isolation and even loneliness between those employees, who may go through new-hire training centrally but then must hone their practices and results independently of their co-workers. They may pick up ideas and tips occasionally from others, but most of how they eventually perform they learn on their own. It's this situation that's motivated me to work toward an online community where our employees could start to interact with each other. My mistaken impression before I read Peter Block's book was that together we could recognize and analyze each others' ideas and practices and then legislate the "best" practices from among those.

After reading the book, I am more focused on the process with which we will do all this. Focusing more on the act of gathering people together either online or in-person, we can determine the best ways for our community of far-flung employees to start working together to improve everyone's success in what we will all accomplish. To risk the use of an old cliche, Block's suggestion is that it is the journey by which we do this more so than any final best practices that we may reach at the destination. So for the original goal that I set out to accomplish in buying this book, such a focus on the ongoing conversation and the ways we are interacting with each other may prove most effective as we establish such a community within our organization.

What was unexpected and a huge plus were the comments Block makes about the way our American systems (i.e., economic, political, educational, social services, media) have become and made all of us so fragmented. I've read many books over the past year that lament how our government is hopelessly partisan, our classes are hopelessly unequal, our values are maker vs. taker, etc. All of those books explain the issues but few have good solutions. Block explains the problem much more elegantly -- that our individualistic narrative; the inward attention of our institutions, corporations and our professions; and the messages from our media all work to make us feel isolated and fragmented from everyone else. He suggests that building greater community among us and reversing the path we are on now is not through government, corporations or large institutions with mandates, budgets and power to make things better. Nor will some super leaders come in with the magical strategies to finally make things better. Rather, Block is saying that we can only do that for ourselves by deciding to work with others in our communities to make things better for everyone.

So, this book is more than just an academic focus on what communities can do to change things for the better. It is the opposite of what Charles Murray set out to suggest in his inflammatory book "Coming Apart." But as some critics of Block suggest, his prescription to work together is not the answer in and of itself. It is the hard work cities, organizations, school systems, social service organizations, and citizens committees all must do to change the context of what they want to accomplish, create the gatherings and structure to start accomplishing the ends that we have so long been trying to reach.

Challenged both democratic and conservative ideologies. At times perhaps a little esoteric, but nonetheless, a strong application intended to transform our ideas about what it means to be a community, to live as empowered citizens rather than "consumers", stop waiting for leaders to save us, to restore trust where it is broken and ultimately (and after a long time of hard work and persistence) end political suffering. Block makes it seem doable. Found myself getting the most out of the details. Might not be great for skimmers.