Community Wealth

“I’ve never seen a tree grow from the top down.” — Ruth Glendinning

Community Roots

I grew up in an educated, financially comfortable, middle class family in suburban West Houston. Most of my friends’ dads worked for oil companies and it was normal for them to spend a couple of years living in other parts of the world, eventually coming back to Houston, only to leave again. My dad was an optometrist so we stayed in Houston as this revolving door kept turning, and life proceeded. This pattern didn’t create the deep roots that I now know are vital to building real community. Neither did it create sustainable community wealth.

What is community wealth? It’s not just financial capital, which is certainly useful, it’s all the non-monetary capital (relationships, respect, trust, environmental, energy, knowledge, etc.) that create the basis of shared experiences leading to wisdom, empathy and community that transform a neighborhood from a collection of individual families sharing a ZIP code to a real community in which every member understands the purpose of Community is to produce the individual and mutual wellbeing of all the participants, in an ongoing way.

I had always felt something was missing from the marketing definition of community, that the surface story of green lawns and malls didn’t tell the whole story of the why of community and…