Michael Vickery
Executive Director
Phone 815.588-6130
Fax 815.588-6159
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| Community Building |
Placemaking | Church Planting
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| Community Building |
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Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays:In eight visionary or polemical essays, Berry (Fidelity ) sounds the themes of decentralization, renewal of community and ecological awareness that inform his previous books. Assailing the U.S. government's role in the Persian Gulf War, the Kentucky poet/farmer/conservationist calls for the creation of a peace academy and urges Americans to ``waste less, spend less, use less, want less, need less.''
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Habits of the Heart: First published in 1985, continues to be one of the most discussed interpretations of modern American society, a quest for a democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditions. In a new preface the authors relate the arguments of the book both to the current realities of American society and to the growing debate about the country's future. With this new edition one of the most influential books of recent times takes on a new immediacy.
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Great Good Place:Cafes,
Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
The Great Good Place is touching more people than ever before. The owners of Seattle's Third Place Books, which opened in 1998, were directly inspired by this book, as are, increasingly, entrepreneurs and planners nationwide. They are fueled by its compelling central thesis: that "third places," where people can gather, put aside the concerns of the work and home, and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation, are the heart of a community's social vitality and the grassroots of democracy. |
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Bowling
Alone:The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Since its peak in the mid-1960s, involvement in civic and community organizations in the United States has been on the decline. From bridge clubs to charity leagues to the NAACP, organizations across the country are seeing their numbers slowly dwindle as their members age. Why is it that, as Tom Kissell, national membership director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars observed, "[k]ids today just aren't joiners"? In Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam explores the changing role of community in the life of Americans. |
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 | Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding And Mobilizing a Community's Assets
This guide summarizes lessons learned by studying successful community-building initiatives in hundreds of neighborhoods across the U.S. It outlines what local communities can do to start their own journies down the path of asset-based development. |
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 | Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits
Amid all the hand-wringing about the loss of community in America these days, here is a book that celebrates the ability of neighborhoods to heal from within. John McKnight tells how the experts' best efforts to rebuild and revitalize communities are in fact destroying them. McKnight focuses on four "counterfeiting" aspects of society: professionalism, medicine, human service systems, and the criminal justice system. |
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Placemaking |
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Experience Economy: Pine and Gilmore posit that every business, whether on the Web or on Main Street, USA, must treat their operation as a stage for engaging customers like audience members. Like Pine's award-winning classic Mass Customization, The Experience Economy takes a slash at the business status quo and makes you think beyond your product.
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Housing as if People Mattered: This book is a collection of guidelines for the site design of low-rise, high-density family housing. It is intended as a reference tool, primarily for housing designers and planners, but also for developers, housing authorities, citizens' groups, and tenants organizations--anyone involved in planning or rehabilitating housing. It provides guidelines for the layout of buildings, open spaces, community facilities, play areas, walk ways, and the myriad components that make up a housing site.
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Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs
First published in 1909, Raymond Unwin's Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs is an extraordinary compendium of images and theories on urban design. As a member of the generation of planners following Camillo Sitte and preceding the emergence of the modern planners of the 1920s, Unwin considered planning a design-based discipline rather than a purely technical one. He believed that artistic and practical criteria were mutually supportive and carried this out in his work by creating plans that represented a unity of art, science, and technology. |
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A Pattern Language:
Towns, Buildings, Construction
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. |
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Free Agent Nation:
America's Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live
The Organization Man is history. Taking his place is America’s new economic icon: the "free agent" the job-hopping, tech-savvy, fulfillment-seeking self-employed independent worker. Already 30 million strong, these new "dis-organization" men and women are transforming America in ways both profound and exhilarating. |
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The Rise of the Creative Class:
And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life
The Washington Monthly 2002 Annual Political Book Award Winner
The Rise of the Creative Class gives us a provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today-and where we might be headed. Weaving storytelling with masses of new and updated research, Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy. |
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The Phenomenon of Life:
Nature of Order, Book 1: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Vol. 1
What is happening when a place in the world has life? And what is happening when it does not? In Book 1 of this four-volume work, Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and sets this understanding of living structure as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. |
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| Church Planting |
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The Connecting Church
The measure of a society's health is how well it takes care of the youngest generation. By this standard, we fail. But All Kids Are Our Kids offers an approach to unleash the extraordinary power of community when people unite around a widely shared vision of healthy child and adolescent development. |
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The Connecting Church
The development of meaningful relationships, where every member carries a significant sense of belonging, is central to what it means to be the church. So why do many Christians feel disappointed and disillusioned with their efforts to experience authentic community? Despite the best efforts of pastors, small group leaders, and faithful lay persons, church too often is a place of loneliness rather than connection. |
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Making Room for Life:
Trading Chaotic Lifestyles for Connected Relationships
If America is sliding into a moral swamp, what's the best Christian response? The hardball approach of the religious right? Or is there a more productive way to engage our culture? Dean Merrill, a former vice president with Focus on the Family, challenges us to transform society--and our own hearts--from the inside out. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Church is about attitude, about living out our convictions in a Christ-like manner instead of bullying our way into the system like any other loud and selfish government lobby. |
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Community 101
Authentic community is essential if the church is to remain true to its God-assigned mission. As the title indicates, the interrelated concepts of community and oneness are presented in this book. Gilbert Bilezikian lays a biblical foundation for this call to community by showing the centrality of community in the sweep of salvation history -- its loss in the Fall, its reclamation through Christ, and its ultimate realization in the New Jerusalem. |
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Creating Community:
5 Keys to Building a Small Group Culture
In Creating Community, Andy Stanley and Bill Willits take you on their amazing journey of developing the small group culture at North Point Community Church. They reveal their five key discoveries about what it takes to create a compelling small group ministry. These discoveries have helped connect almost 8,000 people into North Point's adult small groups. This is not just another book about community; this is a book about strategy - strategy that builds a small group culture. |
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Renewing the City:
Reflections on Community Development and Urban Renewal
Community developer and urban activist Robert Lupton looks to the Old Testament example of Nehemiah as a role model for community transformation and renewal. Lupton sees the book of Nehemiah as the memoirs of an urban developer who transformed a decaying city into a place of security and vitality. |
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