Environmental equity
A opportunity may open up, to work on how how a collection of environmental groups consider environmental equity as integral to their practice. This post is some early thinking about how to address this opportunity. The context. The groups are part of a not-for-profit collective organized to advance climate-change initiatives
Community listening
Sometimes you just need to listen to what the universe is telling you. Stay with me on a short side trip before I get to the main point of this post. I recently was recommended a book by author Peter Block that opens by honoring the influence of John McKnight
Design
Earlier this week I attended another open session of Evanston's Environmental Equity Investigation (EEI) project. It was unfortunately sparsely attended (my perception) by community members. Maybe 10-15 community folks, about 1/3rd the participation of a previous session. Unfortunate in part because the session was well designed and
Thinking out loud
I've been (slowly) hacking away at a longer essay to summarize how I came to think about learning and communities. It's challenging. Like herding concept cats. When I write things like this, I start by trying to find key ideas or concepts that come to represent
Design
I recently facilitated two meetings that took me slightly outside of my normal setting, which was teaching working professionals in a graduate degree program. Both recent experiences yielded interesting insights in my journey to apply my know-how in different settings. One of the things I realized is that these three
Community listening
I originally wrote about this question in At what point does your spidey-sense tell you that you have the right amount of community input? The question is coming back again in a slightly different context. But it is the same fundamental challenge. How do you assess progress toward a vision
Community listening
I had another opportunity this past week to attend a community listening event. This one was successful in a number of ways, but I am now beginning to form a short list of principles I think may lead to improving the design of these events. * Design to the type of
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: Options
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
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 organizing,
Archive - Foundations
[This is a thinking-out-loud piece. No answers, just exploring.] Dr. Shirin Vossoughi, Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, shared her work on inclusive teaching at a recent faculty meeting for instructors in the Master's Program in Learning and
Archive - Foundations
I have the good fortune to be co-teaching two courses at Northwestern University with the talented Teresa Torres, whose work with teams and leaders in the product world is changing how they connect the dots between user research and product design decisions. We co-lead the Designing for Organizational Effectiveness Certificate