Building Neighbourhoods From The Inside Out.

If we know that it takes a village to raise a child, what happened to the village?

When we ask most people about how the saying applies in their neighborhood, the responses follow a pattern:

"Do you believe that it takes a village to raise a child?"

"Absolutely!"

"If your neighborhood is like a village, what does it do to raise its children?

And by that, we don't mean how do individual families raise their children, or how does the school teach them?

We're asking how do you and your neighbors, working together like a village, help raise the local young people?"

Usually there is a long, thoughtful silence at this point and a response something like,

"Well, I know my neighbors, we watch out for each other in some ways, but as neighbors, we really don't raise our children together."

"Well, then, let's imagine that you and your neighbors did decide to work together to raise your children, what would you do?"

Usually there is another long silence. Very few ideas.

We all have opinions about what families should do; we all have opinions about what schools should do. We have lost the imagination of what a neighborhood could do to raise a child. This means there is a great opportunity to organize neighbors to raise the local children - to become a village that raises the children.

We have two questions:

First, in your neighborhood, have you done anything together to help raise local children?

Or, do you know of a neighborhood that does something to help raise their children?

Second, what do you think you and your neighbors could do together to help raise the neighborhood youth?

We need to have answers to these questions and more. For example,

Do people know the names of the children in the neighborhood?

Are there people home in the afternoon that could look out for a child?

Are there tasks in the neighborhood that children can do?

...We do know from the real-life experiences of citizens from neighborhoods around the world that we have worked with is that families and neighbors have the capacity to create a "village" and a life that our schools and governments can never provide. (Peter Block, writing in response to the Phoenix shootings)