Jim Diers - Restore Commons

Jim Diers is an author, teacher and believer of building community. He has traveled the world to spread to power of positive community organizing, and was the first director of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods. Jim currently teaches on the subject at the University of Washington as well as serves on the faculty of Asset-Based Community Development Institute.

Jim Diers’ Content

City Projects
Jim Diers explains that the best city restoration projects stem from local ...
Engaging the Marginalized
Jim Diers elaborates on what can happen in a local setting if ...

Revolution is not capturing institutions, it is discovering free space and enlarging it.

Paul Goodman

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Soren Kierkegaard

Education is never neutral. It always involves a project…either keep things the same or change them.

Paolo Friere

I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.

Henry Miller

If your time hasn’t come, not even a doctor can kill you.

Meyer A Perlstein

Leadership is willingness to have faith in a future we do not understand.

Clint Kemp

Every time you add a highway lane, you slow down traffic.

Bross’s paradox

When we meet, I am talking to myself and you are spying on me.

Leroy

All consciousness begins with an act of disobedience.

Carl Jung

Though the commons is everywhere, it is nonetheless little noticed. For economists, it is a kind of inchoate mass that awaits the vivifying hand of the market to attain life. Forests are worthless until they become timber, just as quiet is worthless until it becomes advertising.

Jonathan Rowe, Our Common Wealth

If I am ever stuck on a respirator or life support system, I definitely want to be unplugged-but not until I get down to a size eight.

Henriette Mantel

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Adrienne Rich

I fear one day I’ll meet God, he’ll sneeze, and I won’t know what to say.

Ronnie Shakes

Most communities can be compared to a football game where 30,000 people who need the exercise turn up to watch 36 people who don’t.

Peter Kenyon

Lost luggage is an initiation ritual. It is an invitation to a simpler life.

Madeline Nold

Our communities are broken. For the ones that look whole, the price is being born somewhere else.

Jim Keene

The power to call people a problem is the most injurious thing you can do.

John McKnight

The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.

Joseph Joubert

A part of kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

Joseph Joubert

Questions are fateful. They determine destinations. They are the chamber through which destiny calls.

Godwin Hlatshwayo

I have tried to teach service to my husband and revolution to my son.

unknown

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.

Italian Proverb

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