Community listening and co-creation

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 organizing site for the community in which I live (Evanston, IL). It’s how I am now beginning to describe – to folks I speak with – what it is I would like to contribute as part of my 2025 journey to connect more deeply to the community around me. (see A 2025 starter: Community, connections and the things that connect us and At what point does your spidey-sense tell you that you have the right amount of community input?)

The language I am using is an experiment of sorts. Trying to find out if a) what I describe makes sense to folks and b) if it even matches any need or opportunity in the community.

So far there are generally positive responses. The community listening framing led to an introduction and a productive conversation with a member of the leadership team at the Evanston Community Foundation, which serves the city’s nonprofit and social sectors and has deep roots across the community. The community listening framing also made sense to a candidate for an open council seat in the city, who I may engage with again at some point. I have more outreach planned based on leads from the Evanston Community Foundation and am continuing to test the approach.

I find that examples really clarify my community listening interests. Two that I have used are:

• Volunteering to listen, take notes, and then help debrief facilitators/organizers after some community meeting or feedback/input session.

• Facilitating group brainstorming sessions similar to what was done as part of Evanston’s pilot of a participatory budgeting process. In this effort, community members interested in a specific area of need (ex: mental health services) came together and participated in a structured brainstorming session to generate a draft solution idea. The idea then went through further development, was crafted into a solution brief, and published along with other solution briefs as potential opportunities to allocate funding. Community members across the city then voted on which ideas should be funded.

The first example of simply listening, taking notes and supporting other facilitators is intended to signal that I am really happy to be a pair of hands. And I am. It really would be meaningful and kick my geekiness into high enthusiasm mode. I share this example to try to offset any perceptions that, as a 70-year-old white guy who spent time teaching at a prestigious university, I want to come in and just tell folks how things should be done.

The second example, taken from participatory budgeting, is more in line with the work I’ve actually led. I missed the window to volunteer to run some of those participatory budgeting brainstorming sessions, but am connected to the groups that were involved in case Evanston starts it up again. It would be great fun to do and to help understand better how my facilitation skills might apply to different, open community group settings.

I am going to add something to that second example that came out of a discussion with my friend and colleague Nicole Dessain.

Nicole has deep experience facilitating group brainstorming sessions with folks who do not do that kind of thing routinely. She noted that the challenge of “community listening” seems similar in that it can easily devolve into just being “input” and “feedback” without resulting in progress. It can also – this is my take – result in the community participants abdicating accountability for progress by declaring “ok, we gave you feedback, now you [leader/organization] do something about it.” Or vice versa, where organization leaders leave the potential community know-how untapped by declaring “we heard you” and then go off and build a solution.

The real focus should be on co-creation. And Nicole reminded me that the tools and practices we each lean on are designed to support a group and its sponsors in actually doing the hard work to collaborate and envision a potential path toward achieving some desired outcome. She noted that the process promotes self regulation toward that goal of co-creation. I think self regulation gets at the spirit of it exactly.

I know, from experience, that getting past merely expressing feelings, opinions and random solution ideas is a real challenge for anyone dealing with a group of people who have something meaningful to say about their own lived experiences. The tools – the process – are important elements designed to address that challenge. But it really takes humility on everyone’s part to be curious enough to see where the process leads, and to trust that only by collaborating will we make progress.

So my addition to the second example may be to talk about wanting to address the challenge of moving community members from opinion-giving to co-creation. Now my interest areas read like this:

• 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 from only sharing ideas and opinions to co-creating potential solutions.

Final thought, and perhaps a topic for another post. But it occurs to me that in the messiness of co-creation, we all sharpen our abilities to work together in a democratic and inclusive society. Someone wrote (I’ll try to find it) that we may have lost many of the spaces where these little moments of democratic activity occur. We need to find ways to regain those moments and rebuild that muscle.

Note: 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; my neighborhood, my city.