The Connected Community Home Page - The Connected Community

Find out how to uncover the hidden talents, assets, and abilities in your neighborhood and bring them together to create a vibrant and joyful community. It takes a village!

We may be living longer, but people are more socially isolated than ever before. As a result, we are hindered both mentally and physically, and many of us are looking for something concrete we can do to address problems like poverty, racism, and climate change. What if solutions could be found on your very doorstep or just two door knocks away?

Cormac Russell

For more than thirty years, Cormac has been fascinated by how people and places weave together to find common purpose. In the early 1990s, Cormac began working with the Irish Health Board, as it was known at that time. Professionally trained in therapeutic approaches and psychological models, he worked with children and young people who were wards of court, attempting to support them into community care settings in neighborhoods, as far away from formal institutions as possible. It was here that he learned the limits of institutional interventions, especially well-intended ones.

John McKnight

John was raised a traveling Ohioan, living in seven neighborhoods and small towns in the eighteen years before he left to attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. There he had the good fortune to be educated by a faculty dedicated to preparing students for effective citizenship. He graduated into the U.S. Navy, where he had three years of “postgraduate” education in Asia during the Korean War.