What are people saying about the guidebook?

I found your characterization of the work as a “guide” rather than a textbook or workbook to be especially fitting—it truly leads the reader through both an inward and outward journey of community building. Your framing of “self-community” and “people-community” struck me as both conceptually rich and deeply humane. The three components you highlight—love, healing, and dreaming—offer a powerful structure for understanding how systems of oppression affect our inner and collective worlds. I was especially moved by your view that love is not merely an emotion but a foundational force for healing, and that dreaming becomes an act of liberation.

The second half of the guide, with its scripts and reflections, beautifully demonstrates how theory and practice can merge. Your insistence that facilitators “walk alongside” rather than “over” the communities they serve captures, to me, the very spirit of community psychology. I also appreciated your description of creating communal agreements around love, healing, and dreaming—it felt like a participatory framework that honors both individual and collective agency.

One line that resonated deeply was your observation that “healing has been commodified, placed behind walls and in bottles that require us to pay fees we may not always possess.” It reminded me of ongoing discussions about the need to “take the capitalism out of healthcare”—a sentiment that aligns with your call to reclaim healing as a communal and accessible process. I was also struck by your recognition of the ways people can form communities even around shared experiences of marginalization, such as seeking care from systems that fail to believe them.

Perhaps most striking was your deliberate use of first-person plural pronouns—“we,” “us”—to describe your own experiences. It blurred the line between self and other, between author and reader, and reflected a profound embodiment of communal practice. It felt as though you were walking with us through the text, creating the very kind of community your guide envisions.

Reading your work reminded me why I was drawn to community psychology in the first place. It was a grounding experience—a return to the heart of this field: walking alongside others, giving voice to those silenced, and believing in the healing power of collective care. We Get to Love, Heal, and Dream is both an intellectual and emotional reminder of what it means to be in community, and I am grateful for the clarity and inspiration it offers.