The single phrase I heard most often from their lips was “the whole person.” Over the past few decades, our institutions have tended to divide human beings into slices. Schools treat children as brains on a stick and pump information into them. Hospitals treat patients as a collection of organs to be repaired; doctors don’t really know the people they are operating on. But community builders talk about the need to take a whole-person approach. When a child enters school, she doesn’t leave behind her healthcare issues, her safety issues, her emotional traumas, her nutritional needs, her need
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