An Other Kingdom by Peter Block

Author:Peter Block [Block, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119194743
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Another example is in Evanston, Illinois, where the oldest urban commune in the United States is located. It’s called the Reba Place Fellowship, after the name of the street. It was founded by Mennonites, and it’s very famous. They live in houses as individual families, but they meet collectively and eat collectively. Some of them have very prominent jobs in terms of income, but their agreement is they will all live on the amount of money that the welfare system defines as poverty. And they have done that for about fifty years now. They bring in so much more money from their jobs than they need to live on that they must, as a community, decide what to do with the excess. They do not invest it in the usual sense. Instead, they buy houses to expand the community.

The Reba Place Fellowship is a community that collectively faces the question, with full intention and purpose: How do we use money? We are seeing this happen in other neighborhood efforts, in the same spirit, with other assets. One example: A neighborhood group went door to door on a couple of blocks in a lower-income neighborhood asking people what they knew well enough to teach young people. On average, people responded with four things that they knew well enough that they could teach. People mentioned things like motorcycle repair. Fishing. Cooking. And also things like how to be kind to others.

So in a two-person household, you would have eight teachables. If there are thirty houses on the block, you have 240 teachables. Let’s say there’s a school on the next block. Imagine the curriculum that the people on the block could provide. If you saw their gifts in terms of what they knew how to teach and then you looked at the curriculum in the schools, think how offerings from the school could be enhanced by what’s on the block next to it.

Thinking this way, we open ourselves to an understanding of the gifts that are already present all around us. We begin to say our future and our productivity are related to this abundance of gifts, previously unrecognized and unused. We might call it a gift economy. We don’t have a school problem today; we have a village problem. We have a village of teachers who are not teaching. When we imagine something like a gift economy, we begin building the commons and building a culture.

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