| Mike Green is an organizer, affiliated with Jody Kretzmann’s and John McKnight’s Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute in Chicago. For four years, Green was the training director of the ABCD Neighborhood Circle, a learning organization of over twenty community organizations across North America to learn “what works’” and “what does not work” and how to use community organizing effectively. He helped found the ABCD Training Group, and now works throughout North America on the practical questions of organizing community partnerships that really work.
With over twenty years’ experience as an organizer, Green’s present framework for practice came from three key life experience areas: community organizing, social work and business. He has experience developing neighborhood resident organizations, congregation-based organizations, and community partnerships to address social and economic issues. He has worked with city and state government, schools, universities, religious congregations, public health, foundations, and human services. He has also worked in business, starting three different successful companies and capitalizing on his experience in business development, marketing, financial planning, and management. He is a licensed clinical social worker (M.S.W.) and family therapist who has worked in human services, public welfare, mental health and schools. He helped start a small public school in Denver based on ABCD principles where students, parents, neighbors, teachers, and principal were all real partners.
Green works from a citizen-centered perspective with a focus on two organizing stakeholder groups: organizing local citizens and their allies to mobilize their local resources to work together to solve problems, and organizing agencies to support citizens and their community development. Much of his work has a focus on applying organizing to the practice of building inclusion and social networks.
Green just published a new book and DVD about successful community partnerships with Henry Moore and John O’Brien called When People Care Enough to Act: ABCD in Action. Green grew up in a small Texas town and has lived in Denver for many years. He is married to Carol, and has one child, Annie, who inspires his work. |
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