Community listening

Designing community listening and co-creation practices

Jeff Merrell

29 Mar 2026 — 11 min read

My professional background integrates learning, knowledge-sharing, design, and change. 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 apply outside of workplace settings.

It led me to a serendipitous moment early in 2025: Meeting the folks leading Environmental Justice Evanston (EJE).

After a year of working with EJE and other community leaders, and experiencing how community listening happens in practice in my community, it appears that a range of challenges persist. Not only about listening, but also moving from listening to co-creating effective civic solutions with community members.

Author and consultant Peter Block describes the co-creation challenge as ingrained through two competing perspectives. The business perspective positions citizens as consumers of local government services; we demand better service from a local government which holds the power and purse. The contrast is a common-good perspective; we citizens have the cooperative capacity to collaboratively produce our own well-being.

Block's work builds off of asset-based community development, a way of addressing how citizens move in power from being recipients to being more in control of developing solutions to local issues. It also resonates with the design with, not for mindset of design justice, which explores how to center power and agency in the community of folks who are impacted by solutions more typically designed by "experts."

In practice this challenge of co-creating effective civic solutions is not either/or: Either our civic institutions create solutions or citizens do. It is a both/and dance.

The fact that the challenge remains, well, challenging, says more about the nature of the both/and dance than the quantity or quality of approaches. Community listening and co-creation are complex and nuanced. How it plays out is forever changing based on the specifics of the issue, the locale, and the moment in time.

As a volunteer for EJE I had the opportunity to attend and observe open public workshops designed to gather community experiences and input for an environmental equity project. I also attended and observed similar city events designed to engage community members on topics that can be seen through the lens of environmental equity.

Finally, I had a front-row opportunity to learn how equity leaders think about community listening and co-creation, and the challenges they face in making improvements to those practices.

All of this led me to try to answer the question: What do I mean by "community listening?" It led me to defining community listening and co-creation as consisting of three elements:

How a group facilitates listening to the community members it serves.
How a group helps community members make sense of what it is learning.
How a group facilitates co-creating solutions with the community members it serves.

Then the question became: How might we design better practices in these three elements?

I've defined a set of general design principles that guide how I look at all three elements. I've also added some specific design guidance to each of the three elements. More will undoubtedly emerge over time with additional experience.

General design principles:

Design with, not for
See the three elements as deeply interwoven
Design to the type of thinking task(s) required of participants
Ensure real lived experience - not conjecture - informs dialogue or decision making
Design for > 90% active participation
Actively reinforce the values of civic participation

Design guidance in each of the three elements:

How a group facilitates listening to the community members it serves.
- Make listening continuous
- Make stories a basic unit of listening
How a group helps community members make sense of what it is learning.
- Understand the role of things we create to make sense
How a group facilitates co-creating solutions with the community members it serves.
- Grow community/neighborhood collaboration structures
- Experiment with neighborhood design process

The following goes into each in a bit more detail.

General design principles

Design with, not for

Design with, not for requires letting go of the "expert designer" power dynamic. Flip the power dynamic. We (the experts) are not here to tell you how you might address your challenge. We must be invited in, and then act in your service.

Interwoven elements

The three elements - listening, making sense and co-creating - are deeply interwoven. We should not think of them as distinct phases that happen in a specified order.

I think of them as generating three distinct kinds of outcomes:

Listening surfaces actual lived experience
Making sense in when a group answers: What does this mean?
Co-creation results in a designed solution

Design to the type of thinking task(s) you require of participants

We need to overlay our listening session design choices with a question that focuses attention on the participant experience rather than our information sharing or data gathering needs.

What types of thinking tasks are we asking community members to perform?

Tap into their memories and share actual lived experiences
Make a decision
Brainstorm solution ideas (individually or with others)
Co-create solution ideas with other participants
Build consensus
All or some mix of the above

This question forces us to think about the cognitive effort folks must put into whatever activities we plan. Some tasks take more thinking effort than others. It also helps us design strategies to model and reinforce the kind of thinking engagement we desire.

Ensure real lived experience - not conjecture - informs dialogue or decision making

One of my favorite structures for group collaboration is What, So What, Now What? (from Liberating Structures). It moves a group toward thinking about new possibilities but only after first understanding what actually happened and then unpacking what that experience may mean.

You also get more reliable information when you ask about specific, real experiences rather than asking "how do you typically...?" or "how often do you...?" "Tell me about what you had for dinners this week?" is better than "Tell me what you typically eat for dinner?"

It leads folks away from sharing ungrounded opinions.
It emphasizes what people actually do vs. what they think they do.
It offers up stories that provide rich and subtle insights into how folks deal with situations and make decisions.

Design for > 90% active participation

How does the event give voice to every participant? And preferably, make that voice visible to both organizers and other participants?

We should design opportunities to tap into the thinking of those who make the effort to join the event. An audience passively listening is still an audience thinking and making connections to their own experiences. We should find ways to make that thinking visible.

Actively reinforce the values of civic participation

If we really value the fact that folks take time away from their families, their routines, and the challenges of everyday life to engage in the work of sharing their thinking about the community, then let's recognize this as a core foundation of our democratic system of governing.

How a group facilitates listening to the community members it serves

The outcome of listening is to surface and understand individual lived experience about some specific challenge.

We're not interested in solution ideas at this point. We're not interested in opinions or conjecture about "the problem." The other elements - making sense and co-creating - will help us define the problems to solve and then design potential solutions.

Listening is about discovering the messy, human details of experience. What is the specific situation and what do people actually do?

In doing so, the assumption is we begin to build a foundation to better co-design solutions that actually improve quality of life.

Two ideas might help us improve the design of listening practices. Credit for both goes to my former teaching colleague Teresa Torres, who developed these ideas as part of her continuous discovery framework for product teams .

Make listening continuous

Listening to the folks who might be impacted by some designed solution typically happens within project cycles. We have a project to gather input or feedback on some local issue or design effort. The project has a start and end time. We listen during that cycle, the listening feeds a phase where experts do something with the input, and we end the project with some new solution.

The project happens. And the energetic listening stops.

Continuous listening means just that. We unhook listening from project cycles and do it as a continuous, on-going process. Which then feeds projects as needed.

This does not negate listening as part of events (projects, meetings, etc.). It adds a foundation with several benefits. You begin to address the challenge of understanding folks’ experience in an ever-changing world by never pausing your monitoring.

It also forces us to think about tiny moments when we might listen to community members. How might we create routine listening practices that take just a few minutes and might occur anywhere, anytime, with anyone?

Make stories a basic unit of listening

Almost all that you might want to know about how folks experience a challenge - more than folks often think - can be revealed through stories. And it's better data because stories are anchored in what people actually do rather than what they say they typically do.

Imagine you want to know how people plan (or not) for grocery shopping. You might want to know:

When and how often they go
If they use a written grocery list
If the grocery list supports planned meals (recipes)
Under what circumstances do they just wing it

The standard approach is to turn these into questions. When do you go grocery shopping? Do you use a grocery list when shopping? Do you plan meals in advance and shop to get the ingredients?

Think of those questions as research questions. You don’t ask those directly. Instead, you create a question designed to elicit a story which will reveal the answers to those questions.

Tell me about it the last time you went grocery shopping.

Treating stories as a kind of basic unit of listening opens the door to many approaches to collecting stories, and tunes you to continuously probe for context to better understand lived experiences in more messy, human detail. Stories can be collected in very formal, structured interviews. Or you can just say “Can you give me a specific example of that? Set the scene for me.” The latter allows you to probe for stories during any time you have a conversation with folks.

How a group helps community members make sense of what it is learning

The outcome of making sense is: Can we take multiple stories of lived experience and define what they mean? As a collective, can we synthesize stories and other data into some pattern or theme?

This may be temporary consensus and change often. But the key is a group of people agree on some meaning.

One idea addresses a common situation in my experience. Someone other than the community members themselves do much of the heavy lifting of making sense. Then the community members are asked to provide feedback.

Who creates the things we use to make sense matters.

Understanding the role of things we create to make sense

"Artifacts without participation do not carry their own meaning; and participation without artifacts is fleeting, unanchored, and uncoordinated." - Etienne Wenger

When a group of people are exploring a challenge or topic, we need to create something - a document, a sketch, a presentation - to help the group converge on what their exploration might mean.

But importantly - what we create does not carry its own meaning. Folks who did not participate in creating that thing do not understand it in the same way as the folks who did participate in its creation.

The design insight we should take away from this: Hold as the highest standard a process which engages community members themselves in exploring their own experiences, converging on what it might mean by creating something together, and then doing something with that finding (co-creation).

If we, as outsiders, create something that synthesizes experiences or data, and it is being shared with folks who had no role participating in that synthesis, then we need to find ways to give more time and space for folks to make their own sense of what we've created.

How a group facilitates co-creating solutions with the community members it serves

The outcome of co-creation is a solution to address a challenge designed by a collective of community members.

Co-creation (or co-design) is really hard. No examples exist in my experience in environmental equity to date. In that experience, community collaboration means the community gives input and feedback on someone else's solutions.

So we still need to explore: How do we use the resources we have to share power with community members in designing solutions and distributing its benefits?

Grow community/neighborhood collaboration structures

Folks are busy. The idea of going into a neighborhood and suggesting they create some way of meeting routinely in order to solve neighborhood problems? A challenging proposition at best.

But the past year yielded examples of neighborhoods facing all the current challenges of today's environment and still collaborating as neighbors, working toward creating a healthier community.

A neighborhood email list for informal communications turned into a resource to monitor and track a nearby business that was releasing pollutants. That effort led to advocacy, inspections and an eventual change in the business's operations.

The city runs a Love Your Block program which provides small grants to neighborhoods to support very local improvements. Neighbors got together, envisioned ideas, and executed them with the funding. Several 2025 projects fall into a broad view of environmental equity.

Outside of environmental equity issues, there are also mutual aid groups. And recently, the incredible informal organization of folks working to protect their neighbors from ICE.

What this suggests to me is there are existing structures and types of structures that have the potential to come to life even given the current conditions. An area of discovery might be to explore this existing opportunity and understand more about growing community/neighborhood collaboration structures.

Experiment with neighborhood design process

Co-designing solutions will test any group's ability to collaborate. Going from divergent thinking (listening and exploring) to converging and consensus creates tension.

In my teaching experience - when we had working professionals moving from divergent thinking to converging on potential solutions - process and humility were key to ensuring that the tension is of a productive sort, helping co-designers stay sharp in their thinking as they converge on potential solutions.

This is something I first explored in Community listening and co-creation, after a conversation with my friend and former colleague Nicole Dessain. Folks need a process - a clear set of tools and activities - to help them work through the tension of making decisions required to land on a potential solution design.

Humility comes into play when you legitimately hold onto the thought that, no matter how good is your process, you're going to get some things wrong. It's a weird dynamic: Be decisive and move forward with confidence, but be humble enough to recognize your own fallibility.

"Trust the process" is a phrase we used when teaching how to design solutions that work in complex settings, such as organizations. But we also did not want folks to follow process steps for the goal of learning how to faithfully execute those steps in some robotic manner.

The point was to learn, through doing, how to make the process steps their own. To understand what works in their particular workplace setting, what doesn't, why that might be, and then adjust and tweak the process to help achieve desired outcomes. To recognize that process and practices are mechanisms for learning.

Which is how I get to experimenting with co-design process in the neighborhood setting. In Evanston neighborhood settings, to be even more specific. How might we work to discover co-design process and practice which fits that setting?

The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.

Designing community listening and co-creation practices

Jeff Merrell