Click Here to View and Download the Celebration of Life for Jim (James G) Kelly

James (Jim) G. Kelly, one of the founders of the field of Community Psychology in the United States, was born on December 21,1929 in Cincinnati, Ohio to James G. Kelly and Cosmo Belle Gray Kelly. Jim was a radio announcer, actor, and sportswriter at Walnut Hills High School where he graduated in 1948. He graduated with Honors in Psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 1953. He received a Masters degree in Psychology from Bowling Green University and in 1958 a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. He then studied with Erich Lindemann, a Harvard community-psychiatrist, whose work left a lasting impression. He received a Masters in Public Health from Harvard while also working with Gerald Caplan and Donald Klein. Following work at the Mental Health Study Center of NIMH, he held tenured positions at The Ohio State University, University of Michigan, University of Oregon (where he was Dean of the Wallace School of Community Service and Public Affairs), and the University of Illinois at Chicago, from which he retired in 1999.

Jim was the last living participant of the 1965 Swampscott Conference, an NIMH-sponsored event that is considered the origin of Community Psychology (CP) in the US. Over the course of his long and exemplary career, Jim became internationally known for his ecological perspective in CP. He understood that this new field would need novel ways of thinking and acting which led him to integrate ideas from biological ecology to his seminal contribution of the ecological metaphor, which placed heavy emphasis on the importance of settings as resources for the health of communities. He spent the subsequent 50-plus years demonstrating how to think and act ecologically in collaboration with diverse community groups and organizations. His development of the ecological metaphor for understanding and changing human communities has become fundamental to the work of Community Psychologists worldwide and has shifted thought in Psychology and related fields, such as Education and Public Health.

He was a founding member of the Division of Community Psychology of the American Psychological Association in 1967 (now The Society for Community Research and Action, SRCA) and served as its second President. Among his many honors were the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Theory and Research from the SCRA in 1978, the Senior Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest from the APA in 1997, and the Seymour Sarason Award from the SCRA in 2002.

Jim mentored doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars with an extraordinary level of commitment to their development. He understood how to nurture the careers of younger scholars both professionally and personally. He loved tennis, jazz, and movies, but his passion was reading. He was able to make connections from Ella Baker to Wittgenstein that amazed his students and colleagues alike. He created a history of Community Psychology through interviews with early contributors and edited books where academics and practitioners told their stories of how they became social change agents.  

Jim resided in Seattle, Washington where he died peacefully on May 16, 2020. He is survived by his wife Seeley Chandler; five children with his first wife Sue Rombach (Jim, Maureen, Ann, Sharon, and Kathryn); and stepchildren Andrew, Martin, and Tom Chandler. He had five grandchildren, James Kelly 3^rd, Sam Sussman, Idarose Sussman, Oliver Willder and Allegra Willder and a great grandson Micah Kelly.