To progress successfully through all of their stages of development, children need to grow up in good communities. Good communities do not occur without viable, productive families. In Restoring Power to Parents and Places, author Richard Kordesh makes a compelling call for the productive familys renewal and provides creative steps for parents, professionals, and policymakers to take to strengthen communities around all children. Kordeshs experiences as a planner, professor, and father, have taught him that productive families are vitally important to the creation of good communities around children. He details historically, and with contemporary examples, the forces in our society that place stresses on families in all sectors. Restoring Power to Parents and Places presents a pointed critique of economic and political forces that have harmed families, but it also offers practical suggestions for action by parents, community leaders, community development and planning professionals, and governments at the local, state, and federal levels. Restoring Power to Parents and Places celebrates the productive potentials of a familys habitat, and it provides tools for empowering familiesgiving them more time and ability to raise their children.

In his acclaimed bestselling book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam described a thirty-year decline in America's social institutions. The book ended with the hope that new forms of social connection might be invented in order to revive our communities. In Better Together, Putnam and longtime civic activist Lewis Feldstein describe some of the diverse locations and most compelling ways in which civic renewal is taking place today. In response to civic crises and local problems, they say, hardworking, committed people are reweaving the social fabric all across America, often in innovative ways that may turn out to be appropriate for the twenty-first century. Better Together is a book of stories about people who are building communities to solve specific problems. The examples Putnam and Feldstein describe span the country from big cities such as Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago to the Los Angeles suburbs, small Mississippi and Wisconsin towns, and quiet rural areas. The projects range from the strictly local to that of the men and women of UPS, who cover the nation. Bowling Alone looked at America from a broad and general perspective. Better Together takes us into Catherine Flannery's Roxbury, Massachusetts, living room, a UPS loading dock in Greensboro, North Carolina, a Philadelphia classroom, the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, naval shipyard, and a Bay Area Web site. We meet activists driven by their visions, each of whom has chosen to succeed by building community: Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley who want paved roads, running water, and decent schools; Harvard University clerical workers searching for respect and improved working conditions; Waupun, Wisconsin, schoolchildren organizing to improve safety at a local railroad crossing; and merchants in Tupelo, Mississippi, joining with farmers to improve their economic status. As the stories in Better Together demonstrate, bringing people together by building on personal relationships remains one of the most effective strategies to enhance America's social health.

This comprehensive handbook to urban ministry introduces and shows how to implement a Christian community development program.

Rarely does scholarship anticipate the most dramatic events of the moment. In this timely work Gary Hart does just that, arguing for the restoration of republican virtues and for homeland security as an important first step. The American democratic republic has from its founding been a paradoxical success. Simultaneously attached to state and national power, citizens' rights and citizens' duties, American democracy has uniquely turned its reliance on consent from the governed into a powerful governing of the consenting. In a remarkable political feat, America's founders combined mixed government, the language of popular sovereignty and a self-conscious emphasis on checks and balances to forge a republic that has weathered the test of time. The complex realities of the twenty-first century, however, have fundamentally challenged the underpinnings of this enduring American experiment, repeatedly exposing the tensions at the heart of America's mixed system of government. What then is the nature of an American republic in an age of democracy? How can the democratic values of social justice and equality be balanced with republican values of civic duty and popular sovereignty? Bringing to light a long-neglected aspect of Thomas Jefferson's political philosophy--the "ward republic"--Gary Hart here offers a wholly original blueprint for republican restoration in which every citizen can participate democratically in the governing of his or her own life. Of crucial relevance for contemporary society, including its startlingly prescient plan for homeland security, Restoration of the Republic provides original insights into issues of national urgency as well as the timeless questions that bedevil the American democratic experiment.

"A new philosophy of organizing is afoot in the land. It works with, as well as opposing, City Hall. It forms ongoing relationships. It takes the long view. It works from the bottom up. It deliberates about ends and means. It crafts voluntary agreements. It fosters common work. After reading this book, you think, 'Maybe we are entering a new era of citizen activism and self-government.' We've learned. I recommend this book to any activist, and to anyone who wants to understand activism in America."—Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University "This book is an extraordinarily useful and comprehensive account of the wave of renewal that is occurring in the United States today. . . . Americans should read this excellent book."—John Gardner, founder of Common Cause and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare "Civic Innovation in America by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland is a wonderful book, rich in insights and stories of the growth of civic learning, dazzling in its facility with issues of contemporary democratic and social theory. It is also a book of democratic hope. As the authors weave together an account of the steady accumulation of learning that has developed over the last generation, they also help to give this growing movement depth and visibility and self-consciousness. Civic Innovation in America not only chronicles the broad and diverse stirrings of a movement for democratic revitalization, it aids in bringing the movement into being. It could not come at a more crucial time."—Harry Boyte, Co-Director, Center for Democracy and Citizenship, University of Minnesota "This book offers a fresh, innovative approach to social movements, especially with its focus on the emergence of partnership strategies (as distinct from more purely adversarial strategies). The book reminds us of the importance of designing public policies that build civic capacity. There is important and insightful information here for scholars, agency professionals, and community activists alike."—Anne Schneider, Dean of the College of Public Programs at Arizona State University "Civic Innovation in America is a remarkably detailed catalog of major efforts at civic renewal in health, the environment, journalism, and community organizing—taking place in scores of cities and towns around the country in the past 20 years. Yes—vital, innovative, in-the-trenches civic work in the midst of the Reagan-Bush-New-Democrat era. To document these efforts and to persuasively show in them common origins, common patterns, and common problems is a civic achievement in itself. Sirianni and Friedland not only describe important social change but contribute to it."—Michael Schudson, Professor of Communication, University of California, San Diego