John McKnight

Sensible Life ~ A Thought

by John McKnight on May 1, 2013 ()

John reminds us that relationships in a personal world are the antidote to following the siren call of progress in a tool-ruled world.… read more »

Flying Down

by John McKnight on April 9, 2013 ()

John reminds us that progress is not all that it seems.… read more »

In response to a neighborhood’s concern about youth problems and violence, John takes a gifts-minded look at how to connect young people to productive adults and offer a means to express their own constructive capacities.… read more »

The Stranger

by John McKnight on January 31, 2013 ()

The full meaning of what it means to be a hospitable neighborhood and how our lives are enriched by welcoming people we don't know into our community.… read more »

Safety and Security: A Neighborhood Necessity

by John McKnight, Peter Block on January 7, 2013 ()

An excerpt on safety and security from John and Peter's book. They say that safety and security, health, the well-being of children, the environment and the land, an enterprising economy, food and care for those on the margin are the seven neighborhood necessities that are fulfilled not by acting as consumers but as citizens of an abundant community creating our own future with our neighbors.… read more »

Worms Everywhere

by John McKnight on January 1, 2013 ()

What we’re looking for is there, if we could see it.… read more »

Government Is Not the Problem

by John McKnight, Peter Block on November 6, 2012 ()

John and Peter reflect on how all the talk that government is the problem actually deflects our attention from the privatization that now runs our culture.… read more »

Community Building through Gifts

by John McKnight on October 1, 2012 ()

John talks about how communities get built by seeing that the principal resource people have for the task is their gifts, skills, talents, capacities.… read more »

You Can't Command Care

by John McKnight on September 7, 2012 ()

Institutional systems can command many behaviors but they cannot command care. Care is the commitment of one person to another, from the heart. It is the domain of people who come together in community.… read more »

We Are the Authority

by John McKnight on August 17, 2012 ()

How the Westside Health Authority started with neighbors asking a simple question: What can WE do about our health, and do it our way?… read more »

The Real Disability Is Disconnection

by John McKnight on July 12, 2012 ()

John tells the story of what he learned traveling across Canada with Pat Worth, the founder of People First.… read more »

The Institutional Assumption

by John McKnight on June 29, 2012 ()

John reflects on how we are misled by the “institutional assumption” in our thinking about change — for example, thinking in terms of medical care, clinics, insurance, outreach instead of health — and what happens when we instead see community life as the source of the outcome we seek.… read more »

Taking Back Our Children

by John McKnight on May 29, 2012 ()

In a very real sense, the kids in our juvenile corrections institutions today are our children. Until we take responsibility for the children we exile to juvenile corrections, we remain unproductive communities. A real community is one where we see that young people we have exiled have all kinds of gifts and we organize ourselves to show our belief in that fact.… read more »

Learning from Other Neighborhoods

by John McKnight on May 7, 2012 ()

Who did it? Are they like me? John tells why these questions home in on reasons why learning from other neighborhoods is more effective in community building than professional intervention.… read more »

Community Abundance Is Its Gifts

by John McKnight, Peter Block on April 26, 2012 ()

In sharing our gifts in associational life, we have the power to produce the future we envision. We are not consumers. We are not clients. We are citizens with the power to make powerful communities.… read more »

This Land Is My Land

by John McKnight on April 10, 2012 ()

John tells of wonderful possibilities like community ovens when neighbors decide for themselves how to use public lands.… read more »

Citizen Cop Out

by John McKnight on March 9, 2012 ()

So many community meetings are often a time of blaming and finger-pointing — a way for citizens to cop out. John asks in this short clip, What would you do differently?… read more »

Fallibility: The Value of Imperfection

by John McKnight, Peter Block on January 31, 2012 ()

The capacities of an abundant community are the core elements that need to be visible and manifest to create functional families and neighborhoods. One of the capacities of an abundant community is the ability to accept people’s fallibility.… read more »

Resolving to Rediscover Entertainment in the New Year

by John McKnight on December 30, 2011 ()

Instead of continuing to be consumers of commercial entertainment, why not have our New Year's resolutions include creating an enjoyable neighborhood and becoming real neighbors celebrating life together?… read more »

How to Teach Children to Lose by Winning

by John McKnight on December 6, 2011 ()

When we admit that most of us don’t really know our neighbors, we are revealing that the primary site for genuine cooperation is absent from our lives.… read more »

Capacity Building Beyond Community Services

by John McKnight on October 31, 2011 ()

John explores the differences between “care” and “service” in this segment from his video interview with The Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities and explains why systems cannot provide care.… read more »

How to Reduce the National Debt by 30 Trillion Dollars

by John McKnight on October 10, 2011 ()

The “obesity problem” isn’t really about overeating. It is about people who abandoned their historic culture and entered a culture of market-directed consumption. Communities are the source of life-supporting cultures. And, within communities are the abundant capacities of productive citizens to grow a new future.… read more »

Lifting the Burdens of Parenting

by John McKnight on September 22, 2011 ()

For many people, “parenting” is a word describing a burden. Usually, they’re correct because they’re carrying an unprecedented load, heaped on their backs throughout the twentieth century.… read more »

Why Families Fall Apart

by John McKnight on August 16, 2011 ()

We delude ourselves if we think our high divorce rates are caused by interpersonal problems and disagreements. It’s not that people are not getting along. It is that they have no reason to be together because they have no functions.… read more »

It Takes A Village to Educate a Child

by John McKnight on July 7, 2011 ()

The neighborhood, like the village of old, has much of what is needed to educate the children when local school districts cut budgets. The work is to revive our neighborhood capacity to be responsible to, and for, our young people.… read more »

Enterprising Economy

by John McKnight, Peter Block on June 23, 2011 ()

A connected and competent community has a vision, culture and commitment that can uniquely assure our sense of well-being and happiness. This source of satisfaction is complete in and of itself — it is not dependent on systems or our next purchase.… read more »

Support Community-Building Clergy

by John McKnight on June 15, 2011 ()

Faith communities can be at the center of community renewal if they avoid professional therapeutic techniques and look to local networks of support when neighbors face the "midnights of their lives."… read more »

5 Questions to Awaken Your Functional Family

by Peter Block, John McKnight on June 9, 2011 ()

Taken to heart, these five questions build community, develop neighborhood competence and give us tools that cannot be purchased from professional service providers.… read more »

The Good Life? It’s Close to Home

by Peter Block, John McKnight on June 8, 2011 ()

Rebuilding families and neighborhoods around the gifts each of us offers… read more »

Rallying the Strength of Community

by John McKnight on June 1, 2011 ()

A first-hand account of the guidance and support that comes from a community of friends through the "clearness" process.… read more »

The Therapeutic Neighborhood

by John McKnight on May 9, 2011 ()

If you have a deeply troubling personal problem, where do you turn? To a cleric? A psychologist? A counselor? A therapist? What about going to a group of your neighbors? They might be more helpful than the professionals.… read more »

Escaping the World of Non-sense

by John McKnight on April 25, 2011 ()

The neighborhood is the refuge from electrical non-sense… read more »

How Much Harm Do Social Services Do?

by John McKnight on April 4, 2011 ()

What is the role of social service agencies in undercutting the power of families and neighborhoods to solve their own problems?… read more »

The Neighborhood Plague

by John McKnight on March 23, 2011 ()

As many people are wounded by joblessness and homelessness, we should resist responses that do not recognize our neighborhood crisis as economic.… read more »

Powering America

by John McKnight on March 1, 2011 ()

Neighborhood power results when we come together to create something for ourselves — from ourselves. This is the power of citizens engaged in community building.… read more »

President Obama's Speech Forgets the Primary Educators

by John McKnight on January 26, 2011 ()

President Obama's advice to parents to support their children to achieve in school misses the most important thing they can do… read more »

Opening the Neighborhood Treasure Chest

by John McKnight on January 11, 2011 ()

Increasing numbers of Americans are neighborless. They often admit that they really don’t know the people who live around them — except to say hello.… read more »

Jackie Kennedy’s Hidden Gift

by John McKnight on December 12, 2010 ()

All leaders are fallible and flawed, but sometimes their fallibility can inspire.… read more »

Don't Ask Your Doctor How to Live Longer; Ask Hispanic Families

by John McKnight on November 5, 2010 ()

Hispanic families and their social relationships might teach us how to recapture the health-giving power of our own communities.… read more »

Beware the Invasion of the Needs Surveyors

by John McKnight on October 5, 2010 ()

There is a growing movement mobilizing the skills of local Americans and the resources of their local communities that has escaped the disabling effects of “needs needers.” These pioneers are remaking America in a new image.… read more »

Repairing Community

by John McKnight on September 15, 2010 ()

As we create functions for families surrounded by supportive neighbors, the problems of "broken communities" will recede.… read more »

Are We Raising Care-less Children?

by John McKnight on August 22, 2010 ()

What can families and neighborhoods do to counteract eroding empathy in our young people?… read more »

Breaking Barriers to Neighborliness

by John McKnight on August 2, 2010 ()

There are many barriers to neighborliness these days. What are some of the ways we can break down these walls?… read more »

What Is a Neighbor?

by John McKnight on July 18, 2010 ()

My Dad, like lots of people back in the Great Depression, had a greeting, “Hi, neighbor.” What he meant was, “We’re in this boat together.” He expected neighbors to help him if he was down and out.… read more »

Two Kinds of Community Organizing

by John McKnight on July 7, 2010 ()

Advocacy organizing and neighborhood organizing serve two different goals. At best, we should be locally organized to do both.… read more »

It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

by John McKnight on June 28, 2010 ()

The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” is universally agreed to with enthusiasm but when we ask most people about how the saying is applied in their neighborhood, the answer leads to two more questions and opens great opportunities.… read more »

Gifts, Skills, Interests and Passions: The Glue That Holds Communities Together

by John McKnight on June 19, 2010 ()

Whenever a neighborhood comes together in powerful and satisfying ways, it is because two things have happened: they found out about each other’s gifts, and they have made new connections based on them. The sum of the two is what “glues” a neighborhood together.… read more »