Community listening
Note: This is a long post - much longer than I usually write. But it lays out the full current state of the work I am doing, and how I think about community listening, co-creating local solutions, and learning what those activities mean for environmental equity in my home city.
Thinking out loud
I've been reflecting a bit on moments that move, that create a shift. It's challenging to identify those moments in real time. Only looking back do you recognize the shift. Which means: If you wish to make change, you probably need to create a lot of
Thinking out loud
The end game for this curriculum: Folks have the power and resources to invent their own ways to create healthy neighborhood communities. I started thinking about this curriculum as involving two types of folks: Those who live in the neighborhoods impacted by historical injustice and environmental inequities. And those who
Thinking out loud
I recently started reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (science fiction is now my favorite holiday from current news and events). A moment in the story stood out. Genly Ai is a human envoy sent out to convince another human world to join an
Thinking out loud
At the upcoming April 2026 meeting of Environmental Justice Evanston I am due to propose a curriculum for leadership development. The desired outcome is to increase the number of people who can lead environmental equity efforts in Evanston. This need comes together for a couple of reasons. The Evanston environmental
Design
Last week I had coffee with two friends from my days teaching and helping lead the learning and organizational change graduate program at Northwestern University. One - Beth - is Head of School at a private Montessori school in the Boston area. Beth is an amazing leader; she gets results and creates
Thinking out loud
I am building off of the first part of my last post: Update on Evanston environmental justice. And folks who give a f*ck. Since that post was published, a second person - Alex Pretti - was murdered by federal agents. The feds lied about what actually happened, refused cooperation with local
Environmental equity
A lot has happened in the past several weeks on the environmental justice front and I want to document the moment as we move deeper into 2026. But I also do not want to ignore the current state of life as the US devolves into an autocracy. Minneapolis is under
Community listening
I'm going to take a break from this writing routine until early January. During 2025 I posted almost every week - 49 posts, amounting to 52K words - and it's been a great positive experiment. I plan to continue writing in 2026. But I want to create some
Community listening
I'm sitting here today contributing work on several things with the environmental justice folks in Evanston: A grant application, comments on a draft report from the Evanston Environmental Equity Investigation, and communications plans with a subcommittee team of a new coalition. It's a long way from
Community listening
My eyes are now tuned to see power in the ways in which we organize to do work. Sometimes power is visibly obvious to everyone involved. Sometimes it is more nuanced. Often, it exists in ways that seem reasonable and rational. Until we start to question underlying assumptions; why is
Thinking out loud
I don't remember exactly when I first read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. But it must have been in high school (1972 or '73), probably during my days as a budding young journalist and editor of my high school newspaper. That was when I first started