10/04/2022
My good friend Michael (Mike) Scott from Perth, Western Australia, last had a drink of alcohol 44 years (16,060 days) ago today. This morning, I’m going to celebrate his achievement with a blog post. Mike first contacted me about our Daily Dose website back in 2002 when I […]
16/03/2022
Here, I share the results of John McKnight and Cormac Russell’s deliberation about what is distinctive about an Asset-Based Community Development process. ‘The primary goal of an Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) process is to enhance collective citizen visioning and production. This paper discusses each of four essential elements […]
15/03/2022
I wanted to introduce you to an amazing healing resource which appears on a page of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM). ‘The CMBM was founded in 1991 by James S. Gordon, M.D., a Harvard-educated professor of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown University Medical School and former […]
08/03/2022
In his recent Kindle book Asset-Based Community Development: An Incomplete Guide, Cormac Russell describes eight touchstones of Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). He points out that whilst all eight Touchstones rarely appear together and do not represent a step-by-step guide to community building, they do show up regularly in ABCD […]
07/03/2022
The most common approach to ‘helping’ communities has involved focusing on the community’s needs, deficiencies, and problems. This depersonalising approach disempowers and often causes other forms of harm to community citizens. The alternative path to community development, Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), focuses on a community’s assets, capacities, and abilities. Significant community […]
03/03/2022
While John and I were in Kojonup recently, I talked about the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach to creating inclusive, bottom up, community-driven change. The ABCD approach was first developed by John McKnight and John (Jody) Kretzmann, along with their associates in the USA. They set up the Asset-Based Community […]
02/03/2022
I have included a number of quotes in these Healing blog posts from Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Here is another, this time about children: ‘I like to believe that once our society […]
16/02/2022
I was due to visit Kojonup with John in late October last year, but had to pull out due to illness. One of the aims of the planned talks was to highlight the legacy of the Carrolup Story, in relation to how it speaks to today about trauma, […]
14/02/2022
John and I will be heading down to Kojonup on Thursday to have a variety of discussions about a new project we have been developing with children’s writer and illustrator Lisa Martello-Hart. This is a community-driven project that aims to use community members, the knowledge of world-leading experts, […]
17/01/2022
‘Dixon Chibanda is one of 12 psychiatrists in Zimbabwe—for a population of more than 16 million. Realizing that his country would never be able to scale traditional methods of treating those with mental health issues, Chibanda helped to develop a beautiful solution powered by a limitless resource: grandmothers. […]
10/01/2022
I’m reading a fascinating book by James Gordon on my Kindle at the moment, Transforming Trauma: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma. It’s a great read, highly recommended if you interested in the healing of trauma. Here is the publicity material for the book: ‘The definitive new guide […]
06/01/2022
I read a fascinating article in The Guardian by Johann Hari about an increasing and worrying problem that exists in much of society today. Our ability to concentrate and attend to matters is being eroded by certain facets of everyday life. This erosion of people’s attention will lead […]
05/12/2021
‘I’m constantly afraid. Even if I know I am doing the right things, I am still constantly afraid of the fear that someone could even take my kids.’ I really like the look of this film, directed by Matt Smiley, about the impact of colonisation on Indigenous peoples […]
09/11/2021
Some of you will will know that I believe that the biomedical approach to mental health—using drugs to treat what are considered to be biochemical disorders—causes more harm than good. I have previously recommended the book What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. […]
02/11/2021
Here is what Bruce Perry has to say about ‘belonging’ and ‘being loved’ in What Happened To You: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing, the excellent book he wrote with Oprah Winfrey. ‘Belonging and being loved are core to the human experience. We are a social species. We […]