Welcome to the seventh CEA Presents Taking Back Our Economy podcast series hosted by Dr Edgar Cahn. Today, our fellow founders of the Community Exchange Alliance: Anitha Beberg, Christine Gray, and Tim Jenkin are joined by a special guest, John McKnight, from the ABCD Institute. Our topic today is "Neighborhood Planning From the Ground Up: Building on people’s strengths."
“John was raised a traveling Ohioan, having lived in seven neighborhoods and small towns in the eighteen years before he left to attend Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. He graduated into the U.S. Navy, where he had three years of “postgraduate” education in Asia during the Korean War.
He returned to Chicago and worked for several activist organizations, including the Chicago Commission for Human Relations, the first municipal civil rights agency in the United States, where he learned the Alinsky approach to community organizing. He then became the Director of the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union, and organized local chapters throughout the state.
In the John Kennedy administration, John was recruited into the federal government, where he worked with a new agency that created the affirmative action program. Later, he was appointed the Midwest director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, where he worked with local civil rights and neighborhood organizations.
In 1969, John’s alma mater, Northwestern University, invited him to return and help initiate a new interdisciplinary department, The Center for Urban Affairs, to conduct research into urban change agents and progressive urban policy. At the center and its successor, the Institute for Policy Research, the work of John and his colleagues neighborhoods focused on the usefulness of local resources, capacities, and relationships, leading to a ground-breaking guide: Building Communities from the Inside Out that describing a new approach to community building that became a major development strategy practiced in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As an aside, it was during this time that John was one of the trainers of Barack Obama as Obama learned the skills of community organizing. John is also the author of The Careless Society, a classic critique of professionalized social services and a celebration of communities’ ability to heal themselves from within. He also wrote The Four-Legged Stool which explains the differences between action by hierarchical institutions and communities. John joined Peter Block in practical explorations of how communities become 'villages' with the capacity to raise their children."
The aim of Community Exchange Alliance is to form a learning community where people come to share their experience, information, and how-to advice about exchange systems such as sharing, swapping, gifting, bartering and local community currencies and also about networks of exchange systems. The Alliance was formed by Anitha Beberg, Edgar Cahn, Christine Gray, Tim Jenkin and Martin Simon, a group of individuals who have dedicated, between them, over one hundred person-years to helping grow different types of local means of exchange that can help to build strong, resilient communities where people feel valued for their contributions and are supported in their needs. We believe that bringing leaders and members of exchange systems together to share what they have done, what they have learned, the tools that they have developed and how it has changed their community, will bring insights to those with long experience in exchange systems, as well as, helpful information for newcomers to this growing movement.
If this podcast inspires you to learn more check out our website at http://www.communityexchangealliance.org or follow us on twitter @comm_exchange. You can subscribe to this channel for upcoming sharing sessions. Thank you for listening.
