Havens: Stories of True Community Healing

By Martin Perdoux, Leonard A. Jason, Jason Leonard

For good reasons, Americans are growing concerned about the cost of health care and housing. There are many reasons why people need care-the addiction of a teenage child or spouse, an elderly relative in need of nursing home care, a psychological disorder, or a chronic medical condition--but even moderately successful institutional solutions for these problems are often too costly to be truly helpful. The cost of healthcare is so high it can result in homelessness. Leonard Jason and Martin Perdoux show us a relatively low-cost and effective solution growing in neighborhoods across the country: true community. People are moving in together to meet each other's needs and, in the process, create a much higher quality of life than they would find in an institution. People living together in these healing communities include the elderly, recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and people suffering from mental illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, AIDS, or Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. These communities offer them a way to recover the caring, structure, direction, and respect that a strong family can provide. The authors of this work show us how communities created out of necessity by their members constitute a more sustained, natural means to healing.

In his foreword, Thomas Moore points out that the communities described in this book are not only physical homes, but also shelters for the soul, places to find the deepest kind of security. Here you will see concrete ways imaginative leaders help those in trouble find themselves rather than become dependent on institutions. It is a new and promising imagination of how social healing works: not by setting up more programs, but by treating people in trouble as human beings, with certain emotional and social needs. This book teaches how to re-imagine this whole process, and now, in an increasingly technical and lonely world, we need this precious wisdom more than ever.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 027598320X
• ISBN13: 9780275983208
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Praeger
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Very inspiring and thought-provoking

This book really inspired me and made me want to live in a community like those described in the book! The authors do a good job of exploring a wide range of healing communities and discussing how and why they work. I think that community is something that many of us have forfeited in exchange for material possessions, privacy, and individual ambitions...this book makes you realize what we have lost in doing that, and what we could gain if we went back to a more communal way of living and thinking. Though the book focuses on people who have addiction, mental illness, disabilities or health problems, I think many of the benefits of community for these groups could apply to all of us. This book challenges the current model of professionals creating fake residenteial environments and trying to use them to "fix" people, and it makes a very strong case that people can heal themselves if they are given the chance to live in an affirming, supportive, and natural community. This book shows that these types of settings can thrive and prosper, and that they make a real difference in peoples' lives. Right now our society heavily favors settings that are institutional in nature, and this book maintains that this really isn't the most efficient use of resources.