Ivan Illich, John McKnight, and Asset-Based Communities

(This post is the result of writing I’ve been doing on my personal project.]

I’ve been reading Ivan Illich’s 1970 classic Deschooling Society and John McKnight’s The Careless Society. I’ve admired the ideas of these two people over the years, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that they actually knew each other and that McKnight was greatly influenced by the time he spent with Illich. Reading the two books side by side (not literally!), it is clear you can draw a line directly from Deschooling Society to The Careless Society. It is probably more accurate to say that McKnight’s asset-based community organizing, as outlined in [Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets]((https://search.worldcat.org/title/36708153) is the how-to to Illich’s why-to. McKnight focuses on determining a community’s _assets _instead of its deficits; not what does it lack, but what does it have; not what can be done _for_it, but what can it do for itself. The goal is to allow the community to do for itself, rather than call on a “professional” to do it for them.

This feels right to me. It feels empowering. And the reason it feels empowering is that it is relying on what and who are to hand to shape their world. Nobody has to be professionally trained, nor do they need to have the latest gear to make everything all ooh-shiny.

There’s a guy my wife watches on YouTube who calls himself the Bike Farmer. He has a bike shop in Wisconsin and he posts videos of him fixing old bikes he’s rescued. He has a phrase he often uses–“Good enough for who it’s for”–that I think applies here. It isn’t that he’s proposing sloppy work and bad stuff–“good enough for government work”–but rather that most people don’t really have the need for all the bells and whistles. What they need is to get out on the road. But YouTube (or PeerTube) is jampacked with how-to videos showing you how to make or do something or repair something yourself. People helping people. And while, as with everything online, there is some pressure to “monetize” their videos, most people make videos because they like sharing their skills.

My friend Tom (@apoorplayer) recently posted a video he found and PeerTube that was a song called “Shitty Gear.” The Toronto musician, whose name isn’t used on the webpage that I could see, writes “it’s me playing various lower quality instruments in an effort to demonstrate that you can make okay music with inferior equipment.” And the song is really good! And I definitely “vibe” with that idea, and I think McKnight would too. People have lost the understanding that they can often make what they need themselves from materials that they already possess or can get cheap. Instead, they think in terms of the “best” (meaning “most expensive”), and if they can’t afford the best, then they do nothing at all.

This is true for theater people. How many years do young people spend waiting tables, going to auditions, and working in the theater only intermittently, when the amount of money they are spending could be used to create their own theater where they and their fellow artists can actually do the work they want to do. They don’t need the most expensive lighting and sound equipment, or a scene or costume shop; they don’t need to spend a bunch of money on marketing; they just need to do the work. Do a show in your apartment, in your back yard, on the library’s stage, in the church basement or senior center.

Look around at your neighborhood, at your friends, and see what assets you have available, and then build on that. In many ways (and I just realized this), my previous two books, Building a Sustainable Theater and DIY Theater MFA are built on this concept of asset-based organization. You don’t need the institutionalized approach – just do the work!