According to his website, John L. McKnight “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”.

While working at the Chicago Commission for Human Relations, the first municipal civil rights agency, he learned the Alinsky trade called community organizing. He co-founded the Health & Medicine Policy Research Group with Dr. Quentin Young, co-founded The Gamaliel Foundation with Greg Galluzzo, and was a founding board member of National People’s Action led by Gale Cincotta. He is currently on the board of Communities First Association, the Abundant Community Initiative, and the Asset-Based Community Development Institute.

In this episode Owen Kelly reads several extracts from The Careless Society, a book he has returned to several times, draws comparisons with the work of Ivan Illich, and points to McKnight’s more recent work.