John L. McKnight, a professor of speech and urban affairs at Northwestern University, was an expert on community organizing and a keen researcher whose work focused on helping neighborhoods understand how to make use of local resources, capacities and relationships.
McKnight co-founded the nonprofit Asset-Based Community Development Institute, now based at DePaul University. The organization works to put into practice the theory that sustainable community development comes from community assets, including local residents and associations, together with the backing of local institutions.
“One of John’s great gifts was his ability to bring his innate curiosity and wonder to any conversation and thus open up possibilities for all present to think something fresh and new,” said Karen Lehman, an Asset-Based Community Development Institute faculty member. “He asked excellent questions that always pointed the way to reflections that deepened the humanity of those he was in conversation with and those affected by what we were talking about.”
McKnight, 92, died of natural causes at his Evanston home on Nov. 2, said his wife of 28 years, Marsha Barnett.
An Ohio native, John Lee McKnight earned a bachelor’s degree in speech from Northwestern in 1953. A Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholar at Northwestern, McKnight was a vocal opponent of segregation and quotas restricting the numbers of Black and Jewish students.
After college, McKnight was with the Navy in Asia for three years. Upon his return, he worked for several activist organizations, including as a human relations officer for the Chicago Commission on Human Relations. In 1960, he was named executive director of the Illinois division of the American Civil Liberties Union, working as a community organizer.
In 1963, McKnight took a job with the federal government as chief of the equal employment opportunity office of the Army’s materiel command’s Midwest region. Two years later, he was named a field investigator for the newly formed, federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A short time later, he was named director of the Illinois advisory committee for the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
In 1969, Northwestern hired McKnight to form the Center for Urban Affairs, which was a collection of interdisciplinary faculty doing research aimed at producing urban change and developing progressive urban policy. McKnight was made a tenured professor of communication studies at Northwestern, despite the fact that he only had a bachelor’s degree.
McKnight also served as associate director of the Center for Urban Affairs working alongside educator and researcher John “Jody” Kretzmann. The two spent four years researching community-building initiatives in hundreds of neighborhoods around the U.S., and that culminated in the publication of their 1993 book, “Building Communities Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.”
“Focusing on the assets of lower-income communities does not imply that (lower-income) communities do not need additional resources from the outside,” they wrote.
“The assets within lower-income communities, in other words, are absolutely necessary but usually not sufficient to meet the huge development challenges ahead. (And) the discussion of asset-based community development is intended to affirm, and to build upon the remarkable work already going on in neighborhoods across the country.”
Firm believers in local residents and local associations’ abilities to be empowered to strengthen and sustain their communities, McKnight and Kretzmann co-founded the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern in 1995.
“John was best at taking a complex idea and demystifying it using a mixture of storytelling and everyday language,” said Cormac Russell, a faculty member at the Asset-Based Community Development Institute. “John never appealed to traditional power because his intention was always to foreground community power and background the role of institutions.”
Mike Green, a former Asset-Based Community Development Institute faculty member, lauded McKnight’s abilities to convey his ideas, calling McKnight “a very gifted communicator in writing and even more so in speech.”
“John could touch people’s hearts, reminding people what it means that human beings are human,” Green said. “He would often say, ‘People will only learn what they already know.’ John helped people remember their wisdom and their basic goodness.”
The Asset-Based Community Development Institute moved from Northwestern to DePaul University in 2016.
McKnight also wrote “The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits,” which was published in 1996 and championed communities’ internal efforts to solve problems and heal themselves while taking aim at professional social services.
He co-authored “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods” with Peter Block in 2010, and he teamed up with Block and noted theologian Walter Brueggemann to write the 2016 book “An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture.”
After retiring from Northwestern about a decade ago, McKnight remained involved with the Asset-Based Community Development Institute. He also continued writing, his wife said.
A first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, McKnight is survived by a son, Jonathon; four stepsons, Marc Barnett, Stuart Barnett, Eric Barnett and Scot Barnett; and seven grandchildren.
A celebration of life service will be preceded by an organ recital that will take place at 10 a.m. Dec. 14 at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 939 Hinman Ave., Evanston. The celebration of life service will immediately follow, at The Woman’s Club of Evanston, 1702 Chicago Ave., Evanston.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.