Community listening
Earlier this week I attended a meeting billed as a community listening event. It drew 100-plus folks. And it has me thinking about missed opportunities to engage every participant who attends such events. The event I attended was styled as a town hall with a very specific topic focus:
Community listening
In the next two weeks I have the opportunity to participate in a few community listening events. I've been thinking about what I want to pay attention to. Three things jump out: * How are the sessions designed to actively listen? And did the design reasonably facilitate that desired
Protest
I did not plan to write this story/post. But the moment filled my heart, and head. I'm using the question prompts to tell the story and what it means to me: How deeply you feel community when it is visible. I wrote more than is really necessary
Thinking out loud
An acquaintance of mine, educator and higher ed leader Suzanne Wilson Summers, posted a comment on LinkedIn to an article calling on us all to remember history and to heed current calls for action. Her comment struck me at a moment when I was questioning my own current strategy of
Community listening
Fair warning: This post gets into the weeds and is long-ish. Jump to the What now? section to get a tl;dr version. My head is swirling in reaction to all the actions that are focused on resisting what is going on around us. Protests, advocacy campaigns, boycotts, political
Community listening
"What if everybody's job is to do repair?" comes from Jessica Norwood, founder and CEO of Runway. Runway is a Black and Brown women-led financial innovation firm focusing on building Black community wealth through early-stage business funding, support and partnerships. Norwood is a successful
Community listening
I plan to share highlights from my weekly posts every month or so via the Wordpress email newsletter (I do not use the email newsletter for weekly post sharing). This is the first of that routine. Let me know what you think. I started this writing and doing effort because
Thinking out loud
One of the items on my initial 2025 actions list - helping produce a newsletter for the complex I live in - came to life this past week. I also crossed a (small) Rubicon by submitting a letter-to-the-editor to the local Evanston newspaper. The letter (unpublished as of today
Thinking out loud
One of the things I am motivated to help all of us get better at is moving away from hurling opinions and ideas at each other and moving toward more reflective inquiry. And I mean "inquiry" as more than just a question, but instead a process that leads
Community listening
My interest is in helping develop or improve ways of community listening: * How a group listens to the community members it serves. * How a group makes sense of what it is hearing from community members. The above three lines are what I wrote as my profile description on a volunteer
Community listening
I see the world as a set of overlapping communities with leaky boundaries. The physical communities in which I reside (neighborhood, city). Professional and personal communities that are anchored in the workplace (Northwestern University is one for me) or through shared activities (like working out at the local YMCA). Everyone
Community listening
I asked this question at a meet-the-candidate event yesterday for someone running for my Ward's city council seat in Evanston. The candidate is really solid. An empathetic, self-proclaimed policy wonk whose career includes a rich mix of community roles and work. At this point, he