Mary Nelson - Restore Commons

Mary Nelson was the CEO and founding president of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development program, for 27 years. In this role, Mary helped create programs that improved communities, especially low-income communities, by creating relationships among all types of people, including the elderly and ex-criminals returning home.

Mary Nelson’s Content

Using Local Assets for Effective Community
Mary Nelson speaks about creating and improving neighborly communities, starting with people ...

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

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Madeline Nold

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

Italian Proverb

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

Jim Keene

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

Paolo Friere

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Clint Kemp

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

Paul Goodman

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

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

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

Joseph Joubert

All consciousness begins with an act of disobedience.

Carl Jung

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

Ronnie Shakes

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

Henry Miller

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

Bross’s paradox

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

John McKnight

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Soren Kierkegaard

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.

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

Meyer A Perlstein

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

Leroy