The Glass Half Full
John McKnight’s work builds on community assets, not deficiencies

Summer 2003, Volume 25, Number 1

Is the glass half full or half empty? John McKnight makes his point.

If there is one image that could synthesize how John McKnight has spent the last three decades of his life, it is the image of a glass half full. McKnight, an IPR faculty fellow and professor of communication studies and education and social policy, has devoted the last three decades of his life to teaching communities that to solve their problems, they must start by cataloguing their assets, not chronicling their problems.

McKnight’s view stands in sharp contrast to how poor communities are generally viewed, especially by those who are paid to make lives in them better.

“We have lots of social workers focusing on meeting needs and looking at deficiencies, but these are people who see the glass as being half empty—not half full,” McKnight said.

McKnight, who joined IPR in 1969 when it was known as the Center for Urban Affairs, gave the Institute’s Distinguished Public Policy Lecture on May 29 at Northwestern University. McKnight will be retiring from teaching this summer, but will continue his work lecturing, consulting, and training with the Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD) that he co-founded with John Kretzmann in 1995.

An early advocate in the civil rights movement, McKnight’s first job after three years in the Navy was working in the newly created Chicago Commission on Human Relations, the city’s first human rights organization in 1956. He helped to organize neighborhoods that were quickly shifting from predominantly white to African American—neighborhoods where whites would sometimes throw bricks at African-Americans’ windows or try to burn down their homes.

“This was the most significant time in my working life,” he said. “It helped to create my understanding of how to activate low-income people to become powerful citizens.”

McKnight continued his work in the civil rights movement, leaving his mark on how the nation viewed and treated minorities. Under the Kennedy administration, he helped to define how government contractors implemented affirmative action.

When he first joined IPR, he conducted research on redlining in Chicago with former IPR professor Andrew Gordon in the early 1970s. Redlining is a discriminatory practice in which banks refuse to grant loans to people living in certain communities, i.e., low-income African-American neighborhoods. Their research was used to design federal legislation to prohibit the practice.

At the same time, he continued to follow his vision of the glass half full—of focusing on assets, not deficiencies—and this led him into areas where one might not have expected him to go. Take, for example, his work on epilepsy.

In the 1980s, McKnight started working with Steve Whitman, an epidemiologist. Following the idea that good health is more a result of good community than the right pill led the duo to identify a nonmedical method of reducing the intensity and quantity of a person’s epileptic seizures through relaxation techniques. These techniques are still used today.

Another area where McKnight has had an enormous amount of influence is in how charities regard those they serve and the funds they raise for them. In 1992, the United Way of America, the nation’s premier fundraising charity in the workplace, was racked by scandal. Its then-president and CEO, William V. Armony, was indicted of fraud and embezzling from the charity. Its new president felt it was time to redefine what the United Way represented. So the charity asked McKnight and Kretzmann to conduct a couple of workshops to teach executives how to focus on assets instead of deficiencies. Seven years and 420 executives later, the two have shown not only United Way how to adopt their asset-based approach to community development, but also more than 100 local community foundations as well.

Beyond the U.S., McKnight has shown that these concepts travel well. He has journeyed to Brazil, Canada, and the United Kingdom, to name a few. This spring he was invited back to Holland by the Dutch Council of Mayors to see the results of eight community organizations that had adopted his principles. In the Canadian city of Prince George—perhaps his most well-publicized action outside of the U.S.—McKnight helped the community to bring some of its most isolated citizens, the developmentally disabled, back into mainstream society.

The word “inspiration” resurfaces again and again in speaking about McKnight’s accomplishments. He is not a one-man show, but rather a catalyst who propels others to visions of half-full glasses. Al Etmanski, executive director of the Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network in Vancouver, started working with McKnight in the mid-1980s. “John nurtures people and has literally taken hundreds of people, like me, under his wing,” he said. “He is constantly liberating our thinking and showing us that small things—like calling people ‘citizens’ instead of ‘clients’—can have huge results.”

That small name change represents so much. At the heart of what he does lies an understanding of the Greek word demos, the common people. This does not seem surprising for a boy from Ohio, captivated by his high school civics class.

“Democracy is not a space dominated by clients or consumers or the objects of institutions, but a space dominated by citizens,” he remarked. “For those who think that a citizen is just someone who votes, they have a radical misunderstanding of what a citizen is and can do.”

For more information on McKnight’s work, the ABCD Institute, or to download a copy of John McKnight’s Distinguished Public Policy Lecture, “Regenerating Community: The Recovery of a Space for Citizens,” please visit www.northwestern.edu/ipr/.