Everywhere there are citizen-leaders inventing ways for themselves and their neighbors to: be safe, produce a just economy, produce good health, produce and distribute a secure and local food supply, care for people on the margin, care for the land, and do a better job of raising our children. These are the domains and measures of the common good.

Community restoration is what we are calling the effort in support of the common good. In every community, every disciplinary field, there are people designing ways to create a counter-story in service of the commons. Care for the commons usually does not go by this name; it is usually called work on the environment, revitalizing neighborhoods, creating bike lanes, creating low income housing, planting vegetables and flowers in urban spaces, safety, working on poverty, or health, or schools or community centers. In each instance, the most significant challenge to collectively solving these concerns can be traced to the disappearance of social cohesion serving the common good in our modern, western culture. The work then is to build this cohesion, variously called social fabric, social equity, or civic engagement. This can also be called community building.