Community Summit Defined the Meaning of 'Neighbor'

President Franklin D. Roosevelt said it best: "The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself."

It's our fears that make us human, that make us a community. It's our concern for the well being of our community that can make our neighborly relationships better.

Peter Block, an author, consultant, and speaker in the areas of organization development, community building, and civic engagement, was the guest during the Greater North Penn Collaborative of Health and Human Services' 7th-annual Community Summit Wednesday at BranchCreek Community Church in Lower Salford.

The theme of the event: Building a Vibrant Community through Conversations That Matter.

GNPCHHS director Anne Frank, who is also director of the Wissahickon Valley Public Library, opened the event with a few remarks.

"We need to create a community that works for everyone," Frank said. "We need to engage in deeper than usual conversations."

Block welcomed the members of various local organizations and businesses to the event. He joked that they all showed up there by choice.

"You can't build a community wihtout music, without art, without light, without a circle," he said.

Block said a successful community gets built by the experiences and methods of its people.

"We have work to do," he said. "Health, safety, land, food - these are things that matter wherever you go in the world."

We too often outsource these things, he said. In safety, there is no relation between arrests and crime. The fear of crime goes up as crime goes down. When 9/11 occurred, our society became a mega-consumer society. 

"The need for community is an alternative to consumerist outsourcing culture," Block said.

As a community, we also believe that the means by which we create the future is distinct from the past.

"Continuous improvement does not create an alternate future. In this culture, the corporate mindset is so dominant, we think management is the point. Efficiency is too small a God to worship," Block said. "We want it smaller, faster. Speed is God and time is the Devil. A community functions at the rate of nature: medium to slow."

Block said our past is unpredictable; it is simply a narrative of our lives.

"The meaning we give to the region is our construction. Transformation is the act of reconstruction of the narrative," Block said. "We need to reconstruct the narrative and what we are good at. We are not defined by our deficiencies."

The narrative, he said, focuses the shift from deficiencies to gifts.

"We have to do something about our likemindedness," Block said.

The community has bought the notion that whatever it is, it is not enough.

"You have to say, on the margin, what you have is enough," he said.

The biggest challenge for a community is getting past the "I know and you don't" form of Colonialism.

People can choose to live in the "wilderness" or be neighborly.

"How do we create neighborliness as an alternative to Colonialism?" Block said. "The whole loving, familial parenting thing is part of the margin."

For the community to focuson what they are and what they care about, the feeling of secularism needs to be erased.

"Religion was brought into secular space. There is space for fallibility. God represents fallibility," Block said.

Fear, he said, is also marketed to a community by journalism.

"The journalism market is fear. It's all scare," he said.

Discovering how to be a neighbor is the alternate to scarcity.

"The world changes in small groups. The intimacy of wilderness is the alternative of individualism," Block said. "The structure of gathering is the way to experience intentions for the future. We don't know what the future has in store, that's why we call it the wilderness."

Frank said the summit was a way for people in the community to get inspired for change.

"As citizens, we can make the change. We don't wait for others," she said.

The way toward that change is focusing on our best experiences we had in being welcoming to others.

During small group breakout sessions, Frank found herself teamed up with a minister from a Mennonite church in Salford and a member of the Visiting Nurses Association.

"We all had similar thoughts. The church wanted to be more neighborly in the community and we want to be more neighborly at the library," Frank said.

Frank hoped the attendees were inspired to go out and make changes in their own neighborhoods.

"I hope they spend less time focusing on what has changed and find out what they want to change and how to change it," she said.