McKnight & Block — Building Community
John McKnight and Peter Block, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (2010).
The Argument
Communities are built from assets, not from needs. The conventional community development model — survey a community’s deficits, design programs to address them, hire professionals to deliver services — actually undermines community capacity. It teaches people to see themselves as clients with problems rather than citizens with contributions. It replaces informal mutual support with professionalized service delivery. It makes communities dependent on external institutions for things they could provide themselves.
McKnight and Block call this the “consumer model” of community — and argue it must be replaced with the “citizen model.” The citizen model begins by asking not “what do you need?” but “what can you contribute?” It maps existing capacities — the skills, knowledge, passions, and relationships already present among residents — and creates conditions for those capacities to connect.
This is “asset-based community development” (ABCD), and McKnight has been its primary theorist and advocate for decades. The Abundant Community is the accessible version of the argument, co-written with Peter Block (author of Community: The Structure of Belonging).
The Heritage Library Connection
The vault’s heritage library concept — making visible the Irohs who are already there, the retired woodworker, the experienced canner, the person quietly doing mutual aid — is ABCD in practice. McKnight and Block provide the methodology behind the intuition.
Asset mapping. The first step is not a needs assessment. It’s a capacity inventory. What does every person in this community know how to do, care about, and have time for? The retired nurse. The person who gardens. The teenager who’s good with computers. The parent who organized her child’s school fundraiser. These are not “nice to have.” They are the raw material of community.
The connector role. Asset mapping is necessary but insufficient. Someone needs to connect people with complementary capacities. The person who wants to learn woodworking needs to meet the person who knows woodworking. McKnight calls this the “connector” — someone whose gift is introducing people. In some communities this happens naturally (the person everyone knows); in others it needs to be designed for.
For Wellspring, the connector might be a role that rotates, a spatial feature (the community kitchen where people cross paths and discover each other’s skills), or a visible artifact (a skill board, a tool library catalog, a heritage library directory). The infrastructure makes the connecting possible; the connecting makes the community real.
The difference between contribution and volunteerism. McKnight distinguishes between volunteering (donating time to an institution’s program) and contributing (offering your capacity within a relationship). Volunteering is institutionally directed — you serve the program’s goals. Contributing is relationally directed — you offer what you have because someone you know needs it. The heritage library runs on contribution, not volunteerism.
The Anti-Service Argument
McKnight’s most provocative and important claim: professionalized human services — social workers, program managers, community organizers hired from outside — often displace community capacity rather than building it.
The mechanism: when a professional is hired to “build community,” the implicit message is that the community can’t build itself. When a program manager organizes activities, residents learn to wait for activities to be organized rather than organizing their own. When a social worker assesses needs, residents learn to present needs rather than capacities. The community becomes a client.
This has direct implications for how Wellspring structures its community support. The design implication: hire for building maintenance and financial administration — the things that genuinely require professional skill. Don’t hire for “community programming.” The community programs itself through its own participation, facilitated by the shared infrastructure (tool library, community kitchen, common space) that the library economy provides.
This doesn’t mean no one coordinates. It means the coordination comes from within — a resident who naturally connects people, a rotating “community weaver” role, a shared calendar maintained by residents — not from a staff position accountable to a board rather than to neighbors.
The Abundant Community vs. the Consumer Society
McKnight and Block frame the argument broadly: modern consumer society has convinced people that satisfaction comes from purchasing goods and services. Including, increasingly, the goods and services of community — connection, belonging, meaning, purpose. The wellness industry, the community app, the $949 accountability circle.
The abundant community recognizes that the most important things — being known, being useful, having purpose, belonging to a place — cannot be purchased because they are not products. They are functions of association — things that happen when people who live near each other share their capacities.
This is the non-commodifiability argument from Lewis Hyde — The Gift and The First Step and the Desire Path stated in organizational development language. The gift dies when it’s priced. The community dies when it’s professionalized. The alternative is not no structure — it’s structure that serves association rather than replacing it.