Community Tool Box announces partnership with Our Blocks

in Psychology

Very grateful to have Christina Holt and Jami Jones join the Blockheads. They do great work at the Community Tool Box, where I volunteer, and it’s inspiring to be able to work with them here as well. As more such stellar people and organizations join us in our efforts to bring you field-tested ideas and tools to make a difference in your neighborhoods, we hope to be able to serve you even weller (no that’s not a real word, I don’t think). Here’s CTB’s announcement:

Our Blocks

Collaboration is a key idea we at the Community Tool Box teach; Chapter 24, Section 3 to be exact.  We emphasize the importance of networking, coordination, cooperation and collaboration as possible relationships that can exist between organizations.

The Community Tool Box was recently introduced to Our Blocks, an online collaborative site connecting people who want to work together to make a difference in the places they live, work and play.

Purple Line

How does it work?

Their writers summarize materials online into concise, easy to read articles, filled with important tags, links and information.  They provide real-life examples of the work occurring in neighborhoods through their community stories.  Additionally, there is an extensive online library with lists of resources available for anyone interested in grassroots community building.

Capturing important topics, such as community engagement, grassroots organizing, and placemaking, the writers for Our Blocks summarize the work being done by coalitions, non-profits and individuals, highlighting their stories, the resources they provide to the greater global community and examples of real-life application of these concepts.

Their site serves primarily as a blog, with extensive links for their libraries, case examples and partners/featured collaborators, however they also use Twitter and other social media tools to network with the community at large.

Our Blocks is entirely supported by the efforts of volunteers. The co-editors are a collective group of individuals working in positions to support community health and development by advocating for improvement and change in their local communities.

Are you interested in learning more and even contributing to the efforts of Our Blocks?  Visit their site: http://ourblocks.net

We at the Community Tool Box are grateful for partnerships with organizations such as Our Blocks, as it brings to light our resources and allows us to share with the global community the tools we offer.  Our Blocks did an amazing write-up about us, which you can read here.

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

in Psychology

Community builders have to bridge all sorts of divides – of race, religion, money, politics, philosophy. In this TED talk, psychologist Jonathan Haidt gives an overview of how — and why — we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and understanding of those whose morals don’t match ours, but who are equally good and moral people on their own terms. Excerpts:

Let’s start at the beginning. What is morality and where does it come from? To find out, my colleague Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines, that you find across cultures and even across species? We found five — five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.

The first one is harm-care. We’re all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

The second foundation is fairness-reciprocity. There’s actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. We heard about this from Karen Armstrong as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

The third foundation is in-group loyalty. You do find groups in the animal kingdom — you do find cooperative groups — but these groups are always either very small or they’re all siblings. It’s only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups — but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don’t have tribes, we go ahead and make them because it’s fun. Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

The fourth foundation is authority-respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species — but authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It’s based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.

The fifth foundation is purity-sanctity. It’s about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you’re willing to touch or put into your body.

I believe these are the five best candidates for what’s written on the first draft of the moral mind. I think this is what we come with at least, a preparedness to learn all of these things.

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