Ken Dunn at the Resource Center, by Patricia Evans for University of Chicago Magazine, 1991
Our longtime supporter and friend of the organization, Ken Dunn, passed away in October 2024. He played a significant role in the origins of the Invisible Institute at Stateway Gardens, and in the creation of our home at the Experimental Station. This summer, Jamie Kalven shared these words at his memorial:
Remembering Ken, I find myself thinking about the mystery of influence. He has been one of the most significant and enduring influences on my life. Looking out at this gathering, I know the same is true for many others. I imagine his influence as a root system, radiating outward, largely subterranean and out of sight, but essential and nourishing, binding us to one another as we honor his life today.
I first got to know Ken thirty-five years ago, when I wrote a magazine profile of him. On the basis of several extended conversations, I told the story of the Kansas farmer who came to the University of Chicago, by way of a Peace Corps stint in Brazil, to study philosophy, then found his true vocation in reimagining and re-engineering the waste stream as a strategy of social transformation.
In one of our conversations, he recalled making multiple trips to Washington D.C., in the 1960s to demonstrate against the Vietnam War. Increasingly frustrated by mass protests in which one is, as he put it, “only a body rather than a mind who could actually demonstrate the reasonableness of his position,” he decided to reorient his efforts. That was the conceptual birth of the Resource Center, which he often described as an educational institution dedicated to demonstrating the practical effectiveness of resource recovery through–another of Ken’s favorite terms–“the rhetoric of action.”
After the article appeared, our conversation continued, as it would over three decades. Before long, he offered me a job working with him to figure out how the various tools the Resource Center had assembled–trucks, front-end loaders, piles of compost, and so on–could be used to build community. For several years, we co-directed a program of vacant lot reclamation that Ken christened “Turn A Lot Around.” (The name proved a tongue-twister for some of those we worked with in South Side neighborhoods who referred to the program as “Turn Around A Lot.”)
At the heart of the program were work days during which volunteers from around the city would join with neighborhood residents to recover vacant lots for community use. The work was infused with a kind of barn-raising spirit, as participants reclaimed the joy of doing physical work side by side with their neighbors.
It produced not only gardens, parks and playgrounds on what had been abandoned lots, but also enduring friendships, love affairs, and at least one marriage. Perhaps most important, it generated energy for ongoing inquiry.
To work with Ken was intellectually as well as physically strenuous, for he never ceased to be a philosopher asking fundamental questions. A man of strong convictions that sometimes verged on fundamentalist certainty, he was also deeply curious, hungry for dialogue, and open to experiment.
It was a dynamic that drove innovation and made him a remarkably generative force in the world. In my case, he helped me spin off from the Resource Center and form an employment program for gang-affiliated young men in public housing called the Neighborhood Conservation Corps. The NCC in turn cultivated the web of relationships that ultimately enabled the Invisible Institute to do reporting deeply informed by local knowledge. Today when the Invisible Institute’s work has been, somewhat improbably, acknowledged by multiple Pulitzer Prizes and the like, it’s important to make known that it all originated working with Ken on vacant lots and talking into the night about how to nurture social change. My debt to him is incalculable.
My story is but one of many that could be told of Ken’s intellectual companionship and patronage. Some common themes of those stories perhaps would be the importance of remaining grounded, of deeply inhabiting one’s place in the world, and of recognizing everyday life as a domain in which one can exercise personal responsibility for the world.
In a dark time, the illumination offered by Ken’s life is precious. He didn’t so much bequeath a teaching or a doctrine or a manual as he left us a noble model of a life well lived. His influence continues.
June 21, 2025