The Connected Community

Discovering the Health, Wealth, and Power of Neighborhoods

By: Cormac Russell, John McKnight

Narrated by: Janina Edwards

Find out how to uncover the hidden talents, assets, and abilities in your neighborhood and bring them together to create a vibrant and joyful community. It takes a village!

We may be living longer, but people are more socially isolated than ever before. As a result, we are hindered both mentally and physically, and many of us are looking for something concrete we can do to address problems like poverty, racism, and climate change. What if solutions could be found on your very doorstep or just two door knocks away?

Cormac Russell is a veteran practitioner of asset-based community development (ABCD), which focuses on uncovering and leveraging the hidden resources, skills, and experience in our neighborhoods. He and John McKnight, the cooriginator of ABCD, show how anyone can discover this untapped potential and connect with his or her neighbors to create healthier, safer, greener, more prosperous, and welcoming communities. They offer a wealth of illustrative examples from around the world that will inspire you to explore your own community and discover its hidden treasures.

You will learn to take action on what you already deeply know—that neighborliness is not just a nice-to-have personal characteristic but essential to living a fruitful life and a powerful amplifier of community change and renewal.

©2022 Cormac Russell and John McKnight (P)2022 Cormac Russell and John McKnight

Wonderful Book

I particularly loved the two chapters that highlighted a "Diary of a neighborhood made visible and vibrant". Those chapters alone were enough to make the book great, yet the rest is extremely valuable too.