Everything is a listening problem
When I first started exploring community listening, I worked at defining what it means. To me.
And while I keep adding nuance to the language I use, it basically boils down to three things. How we listen with other people, how we make sense of what we are all hearing, and how we act on what we've heard.
Everything is a listening problem in that framing. You can go all John Dewey on it and say it's really inquiry. That works for me, too. But the basics are the same. How we listen, how we make sense, and how we act on that sense-making.
This all circled back to me as I reflected on my May writing and what I am facing as June gets underway.
What's ahead of me is an effort to begin eating an elephant: Helping to move Evanston's Environmental Equity Investigation (EEI) recommendations from ideas into active solutions. I'm going to be doing this in a lead role to organize EEI projects through Environmental Justice Evanston and its partnership with the Evanston Environmental Justice Coalition (a new, developing collaborative of many volunteer organizations).
EEI's more than 30 recommendations identify many potential solutions - some big, some small - to address the overarching outcome of reducing the inequity evident in two specific sections in the city. These sections carry a greater exposure to potential environmental harms and less access to environmental assets (greenery, open spaces, walkable neighborhoods, etc.) compared to other (whiter, wealthier) sections of the city.
The EEI recommendations are both inspiring and frustrating. Inspiring in that they remind you that other folks have done this work and there are, in fact, many effective solution ideas. Frustrating in that there is no coherence across the recommendations (they free-floating possibilities), no serious effort was given to connecting these ideas with work in other equity-focused efforts in Evanston (health, housing, economic development, etc.), and there are no priorities. Oh - and it's likely because environmental equity is a complex challenge that many of the ideas might just be ... wrong. Or ill-advised.
It's a knot to unknot.
Which gets me back to listening. I see three stakeholder challenges to explore in trying to understand the universe of feasible solutions a Coalition might develop:
- What neighborhoods can do (participating in decision making and co-creating solutions).
- What volunteer organizations can do (coordinating activities toward shared outcomes).
- What city staff and leadership can do (many departments managing many city plans and initiatives toward desired outcomes).
So I'm going listening. I'm starting with the volunteer organizations and city staff as I know less about those stakeholders than I do neighborhoods. What I am listening for is how they make sense of something like EEI - and what they actually do in similar efforts. Not what they say they do or will do, but what they actually do or have done.
The point of all this is to be better prepared to jointly create some collaborative experiments to energize the potential of EEI recommendations. To understand how key stakeholders think about all of this, and the existing experience and talent they might apply to it.
Among the possible experiments are possibilities I explored in posts this past month:
Jeff Merrell
Jeff Merrell
Jeff Merrell
The listening in June should be interesting. July includes some meetings where a lot of this may come together into a more coherent structure. But either way, when everything is a listening problem, the listening never stops.
