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

I still think these are solid. They point to a system of action: We listen, make sense of what we hear, then build something based on our new understanding.

As I revisit these bullet points, however, I think there may be too much of a bias toward centering the group vs. centering how the group and community members collaborate in some equal power-sharing arrangement.

Here’s a new draft.

• 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-designing solutions with the community members it serves.

I also created key questions to help set the direction for exploring and developing each element:

• How a group facilitates listening to the community members it serves.
  • Key question: How do we use the resources we have to invite the community to share their experiences and know-how?
• How a group helps community members make sense of what it is learning.
  • Key question: How do we use the resources we have to help synthesize data, stories and experiences with community members?
• How a group facilitates co-designing solutions with the community members it serves.
  • Key question: How do we use the resources we have to share power with community members in designing solutions and distributing its benefits?

The phrasing of the key questions – “How do we use the resources we have…” – is intentional. I’m trying to find a way to keep an eye on shifting the mindset of groups from being experts that build solutions (we know what’s best, we’re professionals) to being an organized collection of resources that might be deployed to unleash the “collaborative capacity” of communities to co-design solutions.

All of this comes from my experience to date, watching and learning from a variety of community engagement activities, and from ideas that resonate with the concept of design justice (which I used in my teaching). See What are the citizen collaboration opportunities? and Asset Based Community Development, design justice, and signals from the universe.

How do we use the resources we have to invite the community to share their experiences and know-how?

A trap that we fall into as professionals is relying on habits-of-doing. Need to engage the public? Let’s do a town hall. Or some other form of meeting we’ve done a gazillion times. Sometimes these work and are well designed and effective. But I see it as a bit lazy.

How do we really invite folks in this specific community to share their experiences, at this specific moment in time, about this specific topic, and be confident we are including multiple voices?

It likely takes a mix of approaches and some creativity. I came across an example involving an effort to seek community input on redesigning a local park. The group leading the listening effort used several methods. They walked the park at different times and talked to folks who were there. They hired high-school students to walk the neighborhood and ask residents questions (in a very specific way, within a very defined radius). They held meetings. They conducted surveys. None of these were high-cost efforts. Smart, small engagements. But the impression – for me – is that this group could walk away with high confidence that they listened well, and deeply. They looked at all the potential resources they had and got creative about deploying them.

One of the things I’m also considering, when looking at how we invite the community to share its experiences and know-how, is how we might utilize a continuous discovery mindset. The big change here is moving away from a project or event mindset – where listening is done only as part of a formal project or in a formal event – to a mode where you use some resources to continuously talk to and engage community members. One group used small stipends to fund “roving listeners” who knew the neighborhood; the listeners would just talk to neighborhood folks when and where those folks were available. I can easily imagine adopting several types of small, smart engagement activities like this to continuously meet people where they are – literally – and tap into their experiences and know-how.

How do we use the resources we have to help synthesize data, stories and experiences with community members?

This is an area where a group of professionals have access to talent and resources that are typically not found in the community at large. Crunching data to create visuals and maps. Developing renderings to show design options. Having access to data that adds important insight to community experiences.

An example came up at a recent Environmental Equity Investigation meeting I attended. An issue is tree canopy disparity across neighborhoods; neighborhoods that were impacted by redlining and other discriminatory real estate practices do not have the same tree coverage as more privileged neighborhoods. The team who ran the meeting used aerial photographs – which clearly showed the disparity – and then backed up the imagery with data and illustrations showing how single-family lot sizes differed across the neighborhoods and affected the amount of property where trees might be planted. People in the neighborhood can sense these differences. But the photographs and data analysis connected it directly and effectively to zoning, history and racial discrimination.

What’s important, I think, is for groups to use the unique resources and talent they have to synthesize information in ways that invite conversation and meaning-making by community members. The point of synthesizing is not to create a meaningful insight (although this is an important step). The point is to give community members an artifact around which community members can make meaning, and learn together. What does this synthesis mean, for us? How do we take this synthesis and add it to the stories we tell, or the actions we take?

Again – I experienced this at that Environmental Equity Investigation meeting. Small groups of community members engaged with a poster board of visuals, talking with each other, unpacking what it means to them. That is the point of the effort.

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

Co-creation (or co-design) is really hard. And to push it to another level, where community members take a power-sharing role in the life of some solution and how it works, must be even more challenging. But it’s where I’d love to go.

If we’ve done the good work of community listening, and then synthesizing what we’ve heard so that the community can make its own meaning, we’ve at least got a solid foundation of understanding, and perhaps we’ve built some collaboration muscle among community members. To co-design solutions will test that collaboration. Going from divergent thinking (listening and exploring) to converging and consensus creates tension. It seems to me, in my experience, that process and humility are 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 our own fallibility.

“Trust the process” is a phrase we used when teaching how to design solutions that work in complex settings, such as organizations. We wanted folks to follow the process steps, but not for the goal of learning how to faithfully execute steps in some robotic manner. The point was to learn, through doing, how to make process steps their own, to understand what works, what doesn’t, why that might be, and to be able to adjust and tweak the process to help the group be better at achieving its desired outcomes. To recognize that process and practices are mechanisms for learning.

Which is why I say that co-design is hard. The ultimate test of a designed solution is: Does it create the change in outcomes that you desire? You only know that over time. And over time, everything changes. It’s a never-ending learning process.

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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.