Block, Peter. _Community: The Structure of Belonging_. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Incorporated, 2018. # Progressive Summary # Key Points Block tries to outline a "structure of belonging". The essence of a productive community: trust, accountability and connection. Traditional conversations seek to explain, study, analyze, define tools, and express the desire to change others. They are forms of wanting to maintain control. They become a limitation, not a pathway. ## Small groups The small group experience is transformative. It gives people the experience of ## Questions Questions are more important than answers. A question can transform people, but only if it has the following qualities: - It is ambiguous. - It is personal. - It evokes anxiety. Questions should be about: - possibility - commitment - dissent - gifts The following questions are obstacles, because the hidden agenda is to maintain dominance and to be right. They urge us to raise standards, measure more closely, and return to what got us here: - How do we get people to be more committed? - How do we get others to be more responsible? - How do we get people to come on board and to do the right thing? - - How do we hold those people accountable? - How do we get others to buy in to our vision? - How do we get those people to change? - How much will it cost, and where do we get the money? - How do we negotiate for something better? - What new policy or legislation will move our interests forward? - Where is it working? Who has solved this elsewhere, and how do we import that knowledge? - How do we find and develop better leaders? - Why aren’t those people in the room? The following questions have the capacity to open the space for a different future: - What is the commitment you hold that brought you into this room? - Why was it important for you to show up today? - What is the price you or others pay for being here today? - How valuable do you plan for this effort to be? - What is the crossroads you face at this stage of the game? - What is the story you keep telling about the problems of this community? - What are the gifts you hold that have not been brought fully into the world? - What is your contribution to the very thing you complain about? - What is it about you or your team, group, or neighborhood that no one knows? # Resonances He refers to belonging as the thing we most want. [[Belonging]] # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes ## Belonging > The need to create a structure of belonging grows out of the isolated natureof our lives, our institutions, and our communities. The absence of belonging is so widespread that we might say we are living in an age of isolation, imitating the lament from early in the last century, when life was referred to as the age of anxiety. > Those we label “homeless” or “ex-offenders” or “disabled” or “at risk” are the most visible people who struggle with belonging, but isolation and apartness is also a wider condition of modern life. > Filling the need for belonging is not just a personal struggle for connection but also a community problem, which is our primary concern in this book. We have a hundred ways of encouraging individual development, but we are semiliterate when it comes to the question of communal development. > To feel a sense of belonging is important because it will lead us from conversations about safety and comfort to other conversations, such as those about our relatedness and willingness to provide hospitality and generosity. > By thinking in terms of a structure of belonging, we begin to build the capacity to transform our communities into ones that work for all. > The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, the structure of belonging gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together? > The small group is the unit of transformation and the container for the experience of belonging. > Community exists for the sake of belonging, and takes its identity from the gifts, generosity, and accountability of its citizens. It is not defined by its fears, its isolation, or its penchant for retribution. ## Retributive vs Restorative cultures > Retributive cultures claim to increase accountability, but they actually can’t deliver it. Accountability is always a choice, what someone does when no one else is looking. > Possibility without accountability results in wishful thinking. Accountability without possibility creates more of what we have now, which ultimately turns to despair. ## Leadership > Restoration calls for us to deglamorize leadership and consider it a quality that exists in all human beings. We need to simplify leadership and construct it so that it is infinitely and universally available. We need to end our search for better leaders. We have enough. --- > ... the core task of leaders is to create the conditions for civic or institutional engagement. They do this through the power they have to name the debate and to design gatherings. > > We use the term gathering because the word has different associations from what we think of when we say “meeting.” Most people do not even like meetings, and for good reason. They are frequently designed to explain, defend, express opinions, persuade, set more goals, and define steps—the result of which is to produce more of what currently exists. These kinds of meetings either review the past or embody the belief that better planning, better managing, or more measurement and prediction can create an alternative future. So the word gathering is intended to distinguish what we are talking about here, something with more significance than the common sense of meeting. --- > We hold leadership to three tasks: > • Create a context that nurtures an alternative future, one based on gifts, generosity, accountability, and commitment. > • Initiate and convene conversations that shift people’s experience, which occurs through the way people are brought together and the nature of the questions used to engage them. > • Listen and pay attention. Be able to say “I don’t know.” --- > Listening may be the single most powerful action the leader can take. Leaders will always be under pressure to speak, but if building social fabric is important, and sustained transformation is the goal, then listening becomes the greater service. ## Power of small groups > Therefore, like it or not, the way we design our gatherings is the only way we can bring into existence the possibility of authentic community. Everything that occurs outside the room we are in at the moment is an abstraction and leads us into conversations of complaint and wishful thinking. There is no power in the complaint, no power in more explanations or talking about who else should be in the room. These conversations are a defense against citizen power and action. --- ## Questions > Powerful questions, as opposed to interesting questions, are those that, in the answering, produce accountability and commitment. They are questions that take us to statements that have power, simply in the saying. These statements are requests, offers, and declarations and expressions of forgiveness, confession, gratitude, and welcome, all of which are memorable and have transformative power. > Questions that are designed to change other people are the wrong questions. > Questions themselves are an art form worthy of a lifetime of study. They are what transform the hour.