About

I am by no measure an expert in public engagement, social justice, or the policy and practice of climate resilience and sustainability. How I got to writing about community listening and environmental equity in my home city is a bit of a story.

In 2024 I retired from my last career stop - 18 years as an instructor and associate director for the Master's Program in Learning & Organizational Change at Northwestern University. I had the good fortune to help build a program where community was central to the way we taught and how we operated. I also taught graduate-level courses exploring collaboration technology and design practices in the workplace.

Much of the work centered on listening to folks who experience the impact of solutions designed to address workplace challenges. Then learning how to design better solutions with them, rather than for them.

In 2025 I began exploring community listening - designing with, not for, in local community settings - to discover how what I learned during my career might play outside of workplace settings. I talked to folks who know more than me about the topic. I asked who was doing work, listening to the local community, trying to co-create local solutions to local challenges. Of interest were systemic challenges and how they impact the local community: Food, housing, transportation, climate change.

It led me to a serendipitous moment early in 2025: Meeting the folks of Environmental Justice Evanston.

It's a small group. At that time, a half dozen volunteer members. They were all engaging, accomplished, community-oriented folks with experience and deep knowledge across several areas. But key were the group's co-leaders: Jerri Garl and Janet Alexander Davis. Both had been leaders of the group for the past 10+ years.

Jerri is a retired EPA chief who has extensive experience in environmental policy and community engagement. Janet is a civil rights legend in Evanston, an elder in the Black community whose life work is recognized with an honorary street naming. They are incredibly smart, experienced, passionate and dedicated folks who wrap all of that in grace and curiosity.

At that meeting, we found common ground defining and understanding the problems of community listening. Better yet: The city's Environmental Equity Investigation (EEI) project - an effort to document and describe environmental inequity in the city - was just starting its most active community engagement phase, opening up opportunities to attend and potentially influence community listening events.

And so it began: A focus on contributing to Evanston's well-being in the face of climate change and to be more equitable in doing so.

I am remain a novice in both community listening and environmental equity. But what I know is that you develop expertise by doing, by engaging in the actual practice of something, learning from it, and (for me) writing and thinking-out-loud about it.

As a learning and change guy, I also know that complex challenges like this have no single right answer. There is only continuous inquiry, hypothesis and discovery. What I write here is a record of that inquiry as I experience and reflect upon it.

I publish posts weekly. Highlights are shared in my monthly(ish) newsletter.