A Basic Guide to ABCD Community Organizing
By John McKnight
Co-Director, Asset Based Community Development Institute
Northwestern University
The Culture of Community
Every community creates its own culture – the way the community members learn, through time, how to survive and prosper in a particular place. Displaced people lose their culture. But it is also possible to lose a community culture even though you stay in a place. Many people have lost their culture, even though they live in a neighborhood. They occupy an apartment and don't know the people who live around them. Or they may live in a house but their neighbors are strangers to whom they give a smiling nod. These people are not really neighbors in a neighborhood. They are merely residents occupying a building. They have lost their way. They are lonely people depending on malls, schools, and cars for survival and the tenuous appearance of prosperity
