John McKnight, who has died aged 92, was an inspirational innovator in community development in north America. He was the father of the asset-based community development (ABCD) movement that has reshaped thinking globally about drawing on the strengths of people living on the margins of society.
His many disciples include Barack and Michelle Obama, both of whom he tutored when they worked with community groups in Chicago, and his approach is increasingly espoused by local authorities in the UK, in stimulating a sense and spirit of “place” in neighbourhoods that are long neglected and failed by the state.
McKnight saw his work as challenging “decades of government doing stuff that communities do better”. Professional agencies, he argued, had “colonised” competent communities and undermined their self-reliance based on natural qualities of cooperation, hospitality, generosity, kindness, forgiveness and acceptance of fallibilities.
He identified the community assets these qualities give rise to, such as local associations and the exchange of resources, through a four-year study of more than 300 neighbourhoods in 20 north American cities, funded by the Ford Foundation and carried out by McKnight and his collaborator, Jody Kretzmann. They set out what they had learned from some 3,000 testimonies in a 1993 book, Building Communities from the Inside Out.
Encouraged by unprecedented sales for a book on community development, McKnight and Kretzmann in 1995 established the ABCD Institute, initially at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and subsequently at DePaul University in Chicago. A European affiliate followed in 2014 – a conference in the UK, in Blackpool, the following year attracted delegates from 21 countries – and there are networks now also in Oceania, Africa and Asia.
An inveterate and engaging storyteller, McKnight collected narratives of community building from around the world and from his own experience. He recounted, for instance, how during the 1930s depression his mother had for three years cooked dinner for not only their family of five, but also for their next-door neighbours, another five, while they had no work.
He was sensitive, however, to accusations of viewing low-income communities through rose-tinted spectacles, and would push back against criticism that ABCD implied they had all the resources they needed. Government support was still essential even for the strongest community, he stressed, but the community would know how to use it more wisely and effectively than would any state agency.
McKnight was born in Green Camp in rural Ohio, to John, a school administrator of Scots Presbyterian heritage, and Agnes (nee Hayes), of Irish Catholic stock. He ascribed his fierce antipathy to colonialism to his parents. He had a brother, David, and a sister, Kay. The family moved around Ohio, living in seven different neighbourhoods in the 18 years before McKnight went to Northwestern on a military scholarship to take a degree in public address and group communication.
After graduating into the US Navy for three years during the Korean war, in 1956 he joined the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, a pioneering civil rights agency. There he learned community organising skills direct from the circle around their inventor, Saul Alinsky, about whose personality McKnight had decidedly mixed views, later describing him as “a complete chauvinist”.
The other great influence on McKnight was the theologian and social critic Ivan Illich, who became a mentor and close friend. While he would not have gone all the way with Illich’s distaste for industrialised society and formal education, there was a clear meeting of minds on the damage wrought by external interference in previously self-directed communities.
From 1960 to 1963, McKnight was executive director of the Illinois division of the American Civil Liberties Union, organising local chapters. He was then recruited into federal government for two years to spearhead the Kennedy administration’s affirmative action programme in the midwest, promoting equal employment opportunities. He later recalled “sitting down literally with Henry Ford II, the original Henry Ford’s son, telling him what he’s going to have to do to end discrimination in his company”. From 1965 to 1969, he was director of the midwest office of the US Commission on Civil Rights.
In 1969, Northwestern invited McKnight to return to help initiate the Center for Urban Affairs (now Institute for Policy Research), an interdisciplinary faculty supporting urban renewal, and awarded him a professorship in speech and urban affairs, even though he held only a first degree.
Never wholly comfortable in an academic setting, McKnight was able to spend extended periods on research in the field, culminating in his groundbreaking study with Kretzmann. He was nevertheless an inspirational figure to generations of students and community activists who gravitated to the Center. These included Barack Obama, whom he selected for training and wrote a reference when he made his decisive move from community work into public life, and Michelle Obama, who in a speech in 2009 recalled the privilege of learning from McKnight and how ABCD principles had “really influenced how we worked with communities”.
McKnight resisted retirement, though he enjoyed listening to jazz at home in Evanston. He co-authored his last book, The Connected Community, in 2022 with Cormac Russell, who leads ABCD work in Europe.
He married Jeri Jensen in 1958 and they had two sons, Jonathon and Scott. Jeri died in 1991, and Scott in 2008. In 1996, McKnight married Marsha Barnett, who survives him, as do Jonathon and her sons Marc, Stuart, Eric and Scot.
• John Lee McKnight, community development pioneer and activist, born 22 November 1931; died 2 November 2024
