In the early 1990s, John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann at Northwestern University set out to understand why decades of deficit-based community development had produced so little lasting change. The neighbourhoods that had received the most sustained investment in services, programmes, and professional interventions were, in many cases, no more resilient or self-sufficient than before the investment began. Something fundamental was not working, and McKnight and Kretzmann wanted to understand what.

Their conclusion was uncomfortable for an entire industry built around the identification and management of community need. The problem was not insufficient resources or inadequate programmes. The problem was the question that organised everything else: what is wrong here, and what does this community need? That question, asked consistently and exclusively, produced a map of deficits that became the only map anyone used. And communities navigated by a deficit map tend to find more deficits.

McKnight and Kretzmann proposed a different map entirely. Not because the needs were not real, but because the needs were not the whole story. And the half of the story that was being missed was, it turned out, the more important half.

What the map revealed

Their framework, published in Building Communities from the Inside Out in 1993, identified three circles of assets present in every community regardless of its economic circumstances.

The first is the gifts of individuals. Every person carries skills, knowledge, and experience that are invisible to any needs assessment. The retired teacher. The woman who has navigated every bureaucratic system the state has to offer and could guide anyone through it in half the time. The teenager who can reach an audience that no official communication ever touches. These gifts exist whether or not anyone has asked for them. The difference between a community that thrives and one that stagnates is often simply whether someone has thought to ask.

The second circle is associations: the informal groups that gather without a government mandate or a corporate budget. The sports club, the faith group, the residents’ WhatsApp group, the hobbyists who meet on a Tuesday evening. McKnight and Kretzmann found these to be among the most significant and most consistently overlooked assets in any community. They are the connective tissue through which trust is built, relationships are sustained, and collective action becomes possible. They are also, almost always, entirely absent from the official community development plan.

The third circle is institutions: schools, libraries, local businesses, community organisations, and in an organisational context, the departments and functions that exist beyond their primary purpose. Each carries assets that are available to the wider community if someone simply asks. The question that unlocks them, as this week has explored, is almost always simpler than anyone expects.

The uncomfortable argument

McKnight’s broader work went further than methodology. He argued that the professionalisation of community need had produced a service economy with a structural interest in dependency. The more needs were identified and serviced, the more the service system grew. The more the service system grew, the less space existed for communities to solve their own problems. Citizens were gradually repositioned as clients: people to whom things were done rather than people who did things together.

This is not a comfortable argument. It implicates not just policy but professional practice, the well-intentioned consultant, the community development worker, the change management specialist. None of these roles are without value. But all of them carry the risk of substituting professional intervention for community capacity, of solving problems in ways that prevent the community from ever developing the muscle to solve them itself.

For the ordinary citizen, this argument has a direct and practical implication. Every time we reach for an external solution before asking what already exists within the community, we are, in a small way, participating in the production of the dependency McKnight described. And every time we ask the internal question first, we are, in an equally small way, refusing it.

What this means for you

The research does not ask us to become community development specialists or to master an asset-mapping methodology. It asks something considerably simpler: to change the question we ask when we encounter a problem in our community or our organisation.

Not: who should we bring in to fix this? But: who already here knows something about this?

Not: what are we missing? But: what do we already have?

Not: what does this person need? But: what does this person know?

These are not naive questions. They are the questions that McKnight and Kretzmann’s research showed, consistently and across a wide range of communities and contexts, produce more durable, more locally owned, and more genuinely transformative outcomes than the questions we have been trained to ask instead. The research is there. The methodology exists. What it requires from each of us is simply the willingness to look in a different direction before we look outside.

Questions for reflection

What would a genuine asset map of your street, your team, or your organisation reveal that a needs assessment would never find? What is already present that no official process has thought to look for?

Think about the last time a problem in your community or organisation was solved by bringing in external help. Was the internal question asked first? What might have been found if it had been?

Which of the three circles, individuals, associations, or institutions, is most invisible in your community or your organisation right now? What would it take to make it visible?

If you were to map the gifts of every person within a hundred metres of where you live or work, what do you think you would discover? And what would become possible if those gifts were connected deliberately to each other?

McKnight argues that professional services can inadvertently produce dependency. Where in your own community or organisation do you see that dynamic at work? And what is one small thing you could do this week to build internal capacity rather than reach for an external solution?

Inspiration: Kretzmann, J.P. and McKnight, J.L. (1993) Building communities from the inside out: A path toward finding and mobilising a community’s assets. Chicago: ACTA Publications and McKnight, J.L. (1995) The careless society: Community and its counterfeits. New York: Basic Books.