Happy 2026! We're still working for a more sustainable and green Chicago since 1975.
This former Resource Center program was co-directed by Jamie Kalven, a founder of Invisible Institute at Stateway Gardens that moved their home to the Experimental Station, the former and original building of the Resource Center at 61st and Blackstone. Jamie shared these words copied here at his memorial on June 21, 2025 at the Experimental Station: Ken christened “Turn A Lot Around” as a program of vacant lot reclamation that 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.
