Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) by Cormac Russell

Author:Cormac Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cormac Russell
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Peter Block, photo public domain

Interview Nine – Peter Block

There are incredible possibilities if we are willing to fail to be gods.

CR: Pulling some of the threads of our conversation so far together a little, I’m thinking of E.F. Schumacher’s wonderful observation around the great capacity of ordinary people to take the broad view, and how the great disablement of professionalism is specialisation. Specialists are compelled to take the narrow view and are rewarded for it.

You’ve recently been working with Peter Block, someone who shared that awareness of the limitations of big institutions and another person who has influenced you. Can you talk to me a little bit about that collaboration?

JMK: Peter spent a lot of his life as an organisational consultant with big institutions, governments and agencies, and mostly corporations. When the field started, organisational development was very mechanistic and about managerial control. Peter and a couple of other people were the creators within that field of what I’d call “humanistic organisational development.” If you think of an institution as a place made up of people who work in groups, the question might be, “How does this work satisfy you?” as well as satisfying the managers. Peter was a central steward of that question.

Peter has written a lot of books for managerial people and the world he knows is largely unfamiliar to me.

He began to look around for collaborators, to make a learning path that would be useful outside of institutions. We met each other and he asked me to come and do something with him. And so we got to hear each other in more detail. Peter said I should write a book. I told him I’m not a writer, I’m a speaker! And he said, “Well, would you write one with me?” I said I’d be delighted. So that’s how we got started on the book that’s titled The Abundant Community.

So I would periodically go to Cincinnati where Peter lives and we recorded our discussions about community. He typed a transcript of the tapes, then we’d read them through and talk for a day or two more. And from reading the transcripts again there emerged a pattern. He’s better at figuring out the pattern than I, so he began to set up a framework. The book is the result of probably 10 or so discussions.

Every time I went there we would define a group of people of a certain type— for example upper-class women, working-class Germans, African Americans, and people from the hills in Kentucky—and he’d get a group of them together in his living room. Then we’d sit down with these people and talk with them about their idea of community. Those discussions were very instrumental in shaping our community understanding. We (Peter and I) were from very different worlds and yet had many complementary views and visions.

CR: As a chapter in your life, how does this period sit alongside other periods? Aside from the obvious differences in background, is your collaboration with Peter different in any

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