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BOOK

Breakthrough Community Change

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Discover a powerful methodology for bringing communities together to uncover hidden assets and transform deep-rooted challenges.

Veteran community organizer Paul Born’s work has contributed to
lowering cancer rates in Maine, improving mental health for young people in Florida, and reducing poverty rates in Canada by 20%. In this deeply needed new book, he was able to catalyze local communities and guide them to make significant progress on seemingly intractable community problems.

Born has found that the secret to success is to organize and unite around a common agenda. This is not a list of topics, like a meeting agenda. Nor is it a strategic plan. It is a process for bringing leaders from business, human service organizations, and government together with people who have a lived experience of a specific community problem.

A common agenda is a statement of shared aspirations, a map of the assets in the community, and a roadmap for how to work together to make those aspirations a reality.
Part I of this book describes how to identify your community’s readiness for change, form Leadership, Action, and Strategy Teams, create a common agenda, and establish plans for community engagement. Part II presents the approaches and skill sets needed to do the work described in Part I.

Remarkably, enormous systemic problems like climate change, poverty, disease, racism, housing and many more issues can be best addressed at the local level. Communities can develop solutions tailored to their unique circumstances and can collaborate at a magnitude that can result in truly transformative impact. This book shows how it is done. For Release April 2023

If you want to live in a better neighborhood, community or city read this book. If you fear the future and need hope that large scale positive change for good is possible read this book. If you are leading change in your community, I highly recommend using this book as a guide to improve your outcomes.

John McKnight, Cofounder of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute, and a Senior Associate of the Kettering Foundation. McKnight is the author of The Associational Life and The Careless Society and co-author of The Connected Community, Building Communities from the Inside Out, The Abundant Community and An Other Kingdom.

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