Community Listening
As we began our community development work we knew that we had to reach out to the community broadly.
We also knew that very few people respond to “business-as-usual” public participation methods such as public hearings.
We have invested deeply in our Community Listening model that creates opportunities for relational community dialogues.
The listening process is not simply a group facilitation method.
We connect to adults and youth across many cultures through relationships in the community. We have completed three major Community Listening Projects, each including from 18 to more than 30 small dialogues. In each of these projects, people from the community help shape the process. We use group “listening sessions” that build trust and engage people around challenging questions that are important to them and their community.
Listening About Education and Jobs
A case in point is the Listening Project focusing on education and jobs, which started in 1997.
We worked with other organizations and groups in the area to organize more than 30 dialogue groups, mostly with low-income people from diverse cultures.
The project deepened our relationships throughout the community. We learned that people want to be part of discussions about things important to them. We don’t promise that Hope will act on all the issues that are raised, but we invite people to be part of our effort to make a difference. People who were part of the dialogues helped write a report that went to everyone who participated. What we learned about people’s experiences with and hopes for education and jobs still helps us shape our community-based education work.
Listening About Community
As our revitalization role in the community grew, we began to apply the process to questions more directly connected with community development.
A Listening Project called “Community: Taking a Closer Look” focused on the meanings, struggles, and hopes people attach to neighborhoods and communities. It involved more 300 people in more than 30 listening sessions with multicultural groups including youth, adults, and elders. The discussion was not going to be about what house was going to be where but about how people understand community. It would be about what people need to live stronger, healthier lives; about people’s fears; about struggling with culture and language. It had to go past stereotypes and sentimentalism.
The published report lifted up people’s voices about the multiple communities in their lives, about the strengths of cultural connections and the power in building relationships across cultures.
The report talks about the importance of public spaces and opportunities to come together and the power of relationships and working together toward common goals. Anger about misperceptions and stereotypes is a strong thread in the report. And there is wisdom about threats to community, the critical role of youth, and specific ideas for strengthening neighborhoods.
Listening and a Community Park
We used our listening model in a collaborative project with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board around the future of Peavey Park, an inner-city park two blocks from the Hope Campus.
Hope organizers involved almost 200 people, again multicultural and multigenerational. The principles that emerged were used by a group of community residents who worked with an architect to create what eventually was accepted by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board as the park’s Master Plan. The Superintendent of Parks took the risk to give Hope organizers the power to design and implement a process very different from business as usual. We didn’t want fighting over specifics. Here was another opportunity to get people talking. We had to start with central values. We put dialogue about community at the center, because the park had to be part of the community.
Hope’s organizers worked hard at good basic organizing. They initiated dozens of one-to-one meetings with community residents who used the park and/or lived or worked close to the park. They recruited a leadership group for the listening process by inviting 15 strong people together for the first listening session. Some were from storefront churches across from the park; some were on teams at the park or had been involved with park projects.
The leadership group participated in shaping the dialogues, inviting others, facilitating the dialogues, and bringing together a report and list of principles for the park. At the center of the principles that emerged was the belief that the park must serve, welcome, and reflect the broad diversity of cultures in the neighborhood. The principles also reflect people’s pride in their community and their anger about outsiders’ negative perceptions. They wanted a renovated park to represent a public commitment and investment in their community as strong as that in any other community in the city.
What made it powerful and more than focus groups or “public participation” was the dialogue about the park as part of this community.
People talked about the role of a park, and they talked about their neighborhood. Real community tensions were present in the dialogues. They talked about their anger as well as their hopes. In the end the dialogue was about their vision for the future of their community and the future of their kids.
We Continue to Listen
Community dialogue – formal and informal – is an integral part of Hope’s work.
Another Listening Project informed Hope’s strategic planning in 2004-2005. Youth and adult organizers at Hope continue to organize listening dialogues to inform all our work. Beyond the formal Listening Projects, listening and engaging in the community is a value throughout the organization. Maybe most importantly, as an organization we continually learn about the necessity of deep and diverse relationships in community as the center of all our work. Instead of our ideas of change being dictated by assumptions about how people and communities should change, the Listening helps us stay immersed in the more complex realities of multiple cultures, strengths and challenges, history and possibility.