John Mcknight - Asset Based Community Development - Part 1

Each microphone will be better. Community... Do this, did you hear me better this way? In the back, okay. No use of death. Well, let's see how they have to do so. I thought I would introduce myself maybe as a traveler in neighborhoods. I've had the opportunity for the last 30 years to spend a lot of time in cities all across the United States, in neighborhoods and especially with neighborhood organizations. So this is Old Home Week for me. I'm so pleased to be with you and see how many people have appeared here. I started my first job as a neighborhood organizer in 1953. Anybody alive? The teacher we had that... I think Saul Alinsky. How many of you know that name? Peace of God, they were organizing. And so I did that for about 20 years. Then I graduated from Northwestern University in Chicago, and they asked me if I would come and join them and start a Neighborhood Research Center. I thought I'd try. And when I got to the university, I talked with a lot of the professors to see what they were doing, how they understood communities and neighborhoods. And when I was done talking with them, I was absolutely offended. The reason was that those who had some interest in cities sat in neighborhoods always focused on the problems, deficits, and needs of local neighborhoods. It's as though neighborhoods were places that were like this glass half full and half empty. But if you had asked university people about them, only what was about the empty half. They knew about these deficits. It seemed to me that they really looked at local places and people as broken. That's why I was offended, because as an organizer, what I was dealing with was people I knew weren't broken, and that they were major producers of a good life. But nobody in the university knew that. So I decided that maybe what I could do was get the information that would help even people in universities see that there was a full half in neighborhoods, also to begin to understand more clearly what made successful neighborhood ventures. So for four years, I brought into the university two other cronies, neighborhood organizers, so we were a little enclave in the university. And we went over four years to 20 cities, about 300 neighborhoods. In those neighborhoods, we would go out a block, knock on the door, and say to the person who answered the same question: 'What talents, what people who live here have done together to make things better?' Because you tell us what people who live here have done together to make things better. And we would then collect those stories. At the end of four years, we had three thousand stories of what local people do when they do things better. And by better, we said anything that you think is better—maybe better in terms of doing something for girls, or doing something for the local economy, or doing something that will increase the murals here, or doing something that has to do with health—to make any difference. Tell us what you've done together. So we had the three thousand stories. And then the question was, how can we share this? Not so much with universities, although they've been very interested in this, but with neighborhood folks so that they could see what a traveler can see. That's the only thing I think we know that most people don't know: what would you see if you knew what made for success locally? So we looked at the three thousand stories and decided there would be no use publishing a book with your top stories—nobody in the world would have read it. So we looked at the stories and said, 'Well, what can we say in general about these stories? What are the essential elements and building blocks that people use?' And we actually went over all three thousand. What did they use? One of the reasons we were interested in what they used was that the university people and at that time United Way agencies saw these neighborhoods as empty, problems, deficit. So the stories said they must have used something. What did they use that made things better? And then we looked at all three thousand stories and concluded that there were five basic building blocks that appeared in stories. No initiative used all five at once; it might use one of this and two of that—it was a mix and match. But there were five basic resources. I think of them like ingredients—five ingredients of successful neighborhood initiatives. And we wanted to publish a book, a workbook for neighborhood folks, and we were going to call it 'The Ingredients of a Successful Community Cake.' And when the director of our Plunkett Research Center saw that, she said, 'You can't say that. This is a university.' We said, 'What's wrong with that?' She said, 'Everybody will understand what you're talking about. You've got to use words people don't understand.' So don't call those 'ingredients'—that's for kitchens. So we thought and thought, what is a word for these five things that is accurate but nobody will understand? And we settled on the word 'assets.' An asset is something that if you invest it, it grows, right? So these are five things that if they were invested right, they would grow. Incidentally, that's the opposite of a grant. A grant is a big thing in the beginning which, if you do it right, you have nothing left at the end. The basic development strategy is you know, it's a little stuff that you invest, and if you invest it right, it grows. So we called this book 'Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets.' That sentence got five chapters, one about each of the assets. It describes the assets, tools for identifying assets, and then a selection of stories about how people use the asset and how you could contact the group that did that. And so we committed to printing 200 of those, thinking that would be pretty good if we could ever get rid of 500 at once. But immediately there became a great demand, and last month the report indicated that 116,000 copies have been sold, all beyond anything we ever thought. I got a photograph last week of some people in a village in Ethiopia showing them drawing an asset map of their community in dust with a stick. So it has really spread everywhere. And it is the alternative to a needs-based approach to community development. It's a full life rather than an empty half. So if I can, I'd like to share with you a quick map, a description of these five assets. And of course, I have to say if I knew about atomic physics, I'd be an expert, right? But I am telling you about something you already know. Everybody here who is not raised in the community or does not live in one—well, you raise your hand, say all experts. So all I think the book did was it brought forward the invisible reality of what is there locally that folks have that makes a difference. Because I think what happened is that more and more people became convinced that anything worth having you buy. And so we want neighborhood communities because we began to believe in professional competence, experts, and we lost—we got rusty, we lost too often our capacity. So let me remind you then what you know, but in order you may not have thought about, and that is what are the assets in the neighborhood.