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 … Continue reading My three elements of community listening work

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 facilitated and could have easily accommodated 40-50 real … Continue reading The limitation of relying on a single style of community meetings

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 principles for me. (An example is Have direction, let … Continue reading A work-in-progress reflection: Designing for learning through community

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 things - have direction, let … Continue reading Have direction, let the dialogue go where it wants to go, and engage everyone.