We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the need for love, service, and collaboration within all communities, regardless of their socioeconomic status.
Grace Lee Boggs highlights the importance of fostering strong community ties through love, service, and creativity. She advocates for the reestablishment of neighborly connections in all areas, including urban and suburban settings, suggesting that true progress comes from collective effort and support among individuals. The call to 'bring the neighbor back' is a call for increased social responsibility and unity across diverse communities.
In practice
This quote can be used in a community meeting to encourage local involvement.
People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.
We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present.
How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?
You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.
Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas.
The struggle we're dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity?
I think when you've travelled around a lot in Africa, you understand something that many people here don't recognize: the extraordinary power that is Africa at village level - at community level.
Christian community is the place where we keep the flame of hope alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us.
But the people of the disaster area fundamentally needed to understand that the rest of Australia had noticed their misery and their stoicism and their intense sense of community and determination to arise from the sodden wreckage of their homes, and that Australians would dig deep to help. I helped to describe the community ethos which quickly triumphed over incipient despair. It is this mobilisation of the unifying spirit that thrills us all, even as we mourn.
The tenets of my cultural teachings are rooted in our commitment to lift up every community member so that no one is left behind. Work and food were shared equally. Through our commitment to community, we care about children, even when they aren't ours, and we want our old folks, and yours, to live their last days in dignity and comfort.
The Universe is circles within circles, and everything is one circle, and all the circles are connected to each other. Each family is a circle, and those family circles connect together and make a community, and the community makes its circle where it lives on the Earth. It (the community) cares for that part (of the Earth) but cares for it as a circle - which is to say in a cooperative and egalitarian way, where everybody is cared for, and everybody is respected.
Whatever community organization, whether it's a women's organization, or fighting for racial justice ... you will get satisfaction out of doing something to give back to the community that you never get in any other way.
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