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 when I started writing weekly on Jan 18, not really having any connections to the community and not knowing where my interest in community listening might lead me. But in that Jan. 18 post I made a point of noting a “lesson learned and relearned:”

Many of us want to do things that have an impact. I am reminding myself that connecting with others, about the things that connect us, is an action. You need to trust that the connecting will lead somewhere you want to go even if you cannot see exactly how that might work out.

And you need to make your connecting activity visible.

So yeah. It kinda worked.

But what really happened? What did I actually do? I am acutely aware that recounting how I got to where I am now can easily become reverse engineering a convenient storyline. But I want to try to hit some key moments – productive and not productive – just to make a record of the journey.

The most pivotal moment came in April when I was invited to a meeting of the Environmental Justice Evanston (EJE) group. All the things that are happening now radiate out of that meeting. Before then, I was casting about. After that meeting, I was sense-making and moving toward role-taking.

Moment 1: The candidate meeting and declaring interest in community listening.

In late January I attended a meet-and-greet for a city council candidate. Evanston was deeply engaged in development of a new 20-year strategic plan at that time and it was dredging up a lot of community emotion. In late 2024 I had attended a community input session as part of the strategic planning process (my first community engagement action) and knew something about the plan, topics and issues. The plan really covers all aspects of a creating a healthy, vibrant, livable city for all citizens.

Three candidates were vying for the open council seat in the Ward in which I live. So I spent time getting to know the candidates and understand their views on the plan and its issues. I had watched a recording of a panel discussion with the candidates and was tracking stories in the local press.

But it was at this particular meet-and-greet that the idea of focusing on “community listening” came to be for me. I know that because I wrote about it. Made my thinking visible. And I actually did something: I wrote an email to the candidate, reminded him that I had asked a question about community listening during the meeting, and that I would love to work on that problem if there were an opportunity. He wrote back with some encouraging options related to the strategic plan process.

None of the options ultimately came to be. But I remember sending off the email as a moment. I was volunteering to jump in and do something. Something that may leverage my skills, but took me into an entirely new territory. It was a bit of a leap.

Moment 2: Other experiments and exploring. Trusting that action leads somewhere.

At that same time, and through the first half of the year, I did other things that never fully developed. I experimented with the 100 Evanston Stories project – an effort I made to gather short stories of how folks leaned on the Evanston community to get them through Trump nonsense. I wrote a letter-to-the editor to the local newspaper that was never published. I attended a webinar (which turned out to be just me attending) to learn about advocacy for affordable housing, a key issue in Evanston that was generating a lot of emotion through the city.

I remember having some hope that the affordable housing organization that hosted the webinar might provide an opportunity to work on community listening. I did not follow up with them after the webinar; it was clear they were on a mission to find advocates to speak on specific policies that were already defined. Something didn’t seem a fit for me at that point. I now look back and realize that perhaps my interest is in first understanding the community for whom I might advocate, before being an advocate.

One successful experiment: With neighbors, I helped launch a quarterly newsletter for the condo community in which I live. We’ve just completed our first full year. After each issue, we surveyed the community for feedback and guidance and started to chip away at making 150 independent units more of a community.

Moment 3: Introduction to Environmental Justice Evanston (EJE). Finding common ground on community listening.

I continued to reach out and speak to a lot of folks. Now, however, I had a focus: I wanted to assist in community listening. So I asked folks about that work: What did it look like, who was doing it, who might be interested in volunteer help?

I spoke to a VP at the Evanston Community Foundation who gave me great insights and led me to look more deeply at some city of Evanston efforts in community health. I continued to look at affordable housing, and noted that a graduate of the master’s degree program I helped run at Northwestern University worked at a regional not-for-profit which did work in that area. We met for coffee and I got more encouraging feedback on how some of the know-how we taught in that masters program would help civic and not-for-profit organizations.

And it was that alum who connected me to Environmental Justice Evanston (EJE) and the Evanston Environmental Equity Investigation project. It was very random and informal. After our coffee chat, she emailed and said “you might want to check out these folks.”

I emailed EJE in late February, sharing my interest in community listening. They invited me to attend their next group meeting in late March as a guest.

After attending the meeting I really felt I had found a home.

It’s a small group. At that time, a half dozen volunteer members. They were all engaging, smart, community-oriented folks with experience and knowledge across several domains. But key were the group’s co-leaders: Jerri Garl and Janet Alexander Davis. Both were veteran leaders of the group for the past 10 years.

Jerri is a retired EPA chief who has extensive experience in environmental policy and community engagement. Janet is a civil rights legend in Evanston – an elder in the Black community whose life work is recognized with an honorary street naming. They are incredibly smart, experienced, passionate and dedicated folks who wrap all of that in grace and curiosity.

We found common ground on defining and understanding the problems of community listening. And better yet: The city’s Environmental Equity Investigation (EEI) project – an effort to document and describe environmental inequity in the city – was just starting its most active community engagement stages, opening up opportunities to attend community listening events.

Moment 4: The EEI Workshop. Finding my value.

In late April I attended an EEI community workshop at a local church. It was designed by the consultants leading the effort to gather feedback and lived experiences regarding several early themes that were emerging in the EEI’s earlier work with the community, About 40 community members attended.

Jerri and Janet were there, as listeners and participants. Both were also formally part of EEI as members of committees of community leaders.

I participated in the workshop as a community member, joining activities and conversations. But I also made some notes about the design of the workshop based on my experience designing and facilitating similar activities in my work as an educator.

At the end of the event, Jerri asked me what I thought. I said I had made some notes and saw a few things that I think could improve the design of similar sessions. I then offered to write up a short debrief and send it to her. She was enthusiastic in her response.

What I wrote is largely captured in Designing community listening events. I sent a shorter version of this thinking to Jerri in a document. She asked for permission to share it with the consultants who were leading the project.

She did. Both Jerri and the consultants were effusive in their response to my notes and recommendations. This gave me feedback that some of my experience and expertise might translate well to this new context: Civic community engagement.

Moments 4(a): Keeping conversations open, learning about environmental justice, and sense-making.

While these first four key moments came together to light a path, I also note that I spent time continuing to talk with new and old connections, to read more about environmental and climate justice and community, and to make sense of it all by writing here.

These are really on-going activities. Small things. Informal conversations. Following links down rabbit holes. I don’t write about all of it here. But each conversation or article or book contributes to building a perspective. It provides a kind of vocabulary that helps me connect experiences and ideas which come out of working with the local environmental justice community.

I recognize these activities as valuable. How do I know that? Because I keep doing them.

Moment 5: Exploring design with Open Communities. More validation of value.

In late May, I led a one-hour conversation with the team at Open Communities – a housing advocacy organization – about designing community engagement events. It came about through an invitation from the alum of the master’s degree program where I taught (the same individual who first tipped me off to EJE and the Environmental Equity Investigation). The purpose was to share my experience in thinking more deeply about the nuances of design choices when it comes to community listening.

The experience validated the same lesson I learned after providing feedback about the EEI workshop: My experience and know-how translates to new settings. My sense of where I might contribute to community listening was coming together.

Moment 6: Environmental Justice Coalition strategy meetings. Moving from sense-making to active role-taking.

What’s important to know about the Evanston Environmental Justice Coalition is that it is in its infancy and it brings together many civic organizations whose work explicitly or indirectly includes environmental justice issues. The folks at Environmental Justice Evanston – Jerri, Janet and others – play central roles as members of the Coalition. Really, the Coalition is a natural outgrowth of the work Jerri and Janet have been doing over the years.

A couple of moments led up to moment 6, over the summer and into fall. EEI held additional workshops in July and October. The Environmental Justice Evanston folks met in late September to consider its role as 1) EEI was coming to a close at the end of 2025 and 2) the Evanston Environmental Justice Coalition was reaching a new stage in its early development.

The EJE meeting led to me getting involved more directly with the Coalition. I joined a small subset of Coalition folks who met weekly in October to discuss topics which might be covered in two, one-half-day strategy sessions planned for early November. The sessions would focus on Coalition strategy and organization for 2026.

The strategy sessions were face-to-face working meetings with a dozen or so folks. A lot went on. But the event ended with folks forming four working teams: Policy and Advocacy, Events, Communications and Engagement and Fundraising. I volunteered to lead the Communications and Engagement team (three folks plus me).

That represented a clear shift in my participation, from listening and observing and sharing thoughts, to taking an active role. The communications team has met once already and is mapping out plans for the coming weeks. My time at the strategy session also led to more background conversations with several key members of the Coalition, and to my contributing to the writing of a small grant proposal with other volunteers.

The communications, strategy and grant work is the work I have been doing for the past three weeks, and which is clearly leading me into other activities.

What it means

The short answer is be present and do stuff. It works.

But I also want to step back over the final weeks of this year to reflect a bit more on this story and what I’ve learned. How might it best inform how I think about 2026?

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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.