Design - Jeff Merrell

Full moon over Lake Michigan and an Evanston neighborhood.

Design

Thinking about thinking tasks

Let's start with a fictional account about a real meeting to illustrate thinking about thinking tasks in the design of community listening activities. You live in a close-knit neighborhood and recently felt a nudge to learn more about local efforts that impact climate change. Your 3rd grade daughter

Blue sky and clouds above the downtEvanston skyline

Community listening

Designing community listening and co-creation practices

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 -

CTA L train in motion, blurred image at night.

Community listening

2026: Community listening and environmental equity in Evanston

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.

Black and white photo of a CTA L train crossing an overpass.

Thinking out loud

Thinking about: Environmental equity curriculum (part 2)

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

Winter beach scene on Lake Michigan. Snow and solitary figure walking.

Thinking out loud

Thinking about: Leadership curriculum for Evanston environmental equity

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

Lake Michigan snow-covered beach in Evanston.

Design

Design (and other) lessons from a K-8 school leader

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

Couple walking a dog on a Lake Michigan lakefont park, covered in snow.

Community listening

The story of 2025

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

Walkway over the sand on an Evanston beach on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Community listening

What I learned about paying attention to details in community listening. From an AI product team.

My former teaching partner and friend Teresa Torres is off on a new venture - the Just Now Possible podcast, where Teresa takes a dive deep with folks who use AI as part of the digital products they design and build. A recent episode focused on ZenCity, which provides an

Community listening

"If this were in place, what would it do for you?"

Last night I attended the 4th (and final) workshop that is part of Evanston's Environmental Equity Investigation (EEI). (See past post about EEI: The limitation of relying on a single style of community meetings) I'm thinking about this event in terms of lessons to be learned

Design

What organizations forget: Building relationships matters.

I was reminded of this lesson about how organizations often overlook their most powerful lever - building relationships - in the span of a few hours this past week. The power comes when folks get to know other folks, and importantly know what those folks know and care about. Those

Environmental equity

Monthly update (September): Environmental equity, community listening and pedagogy that rhymes with design practice

I took a step back during the past month to reflect on what I am learning about environmental equity and community listening, and what each means to me. All of this is a learning work-in-progress. I am starting to frame environmental equity as a challenge consisting of two types of

Community listening

My three elements of community listening work

Early on in my community-listening learning journey this year, I wrote that I was interested in working with groups in three related areas: * How a group listens to the community members it serves. * How a group makes sense of what it is hearing from community members. * How community members move