Places People Change

In the Season One finale of Places People Change, producer David Park turns the mic on host Shawn Duncan to look back on eight conversations through three lenses of neighborhood belonging: social cohesion (connection), sense of place (attachment), and collective efficacy (power). Shawn shares the season's most surprising thread: you don't get more participation by asking less of people. Neighborhoods thrive when residents are invited to invest in one another, and trust has to be built first, before action. Drawing on the many rich conversations from Season One, the episode closes with a prayerful summons to root oneself in place and always moments for connection and belonging.

In this episode, we chat with two incredible leaders who have spent over a decade leading Participatory Action Research for the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. They share their deep wisdom to challenge our assumptions about what makes data reliable and who counts as legitimate researchers in our neighborhoods.We discuss how their research focuses not on studying a community, but on building an infrastructure of care that ensures people are heard within the context of relationships, so they can own the change together.You’ll hear how their survey work can often resemble neighbor-to-neighbor therapy more than data gathering.Throughout the conversation, they present a vision of community-based research where data is democratized and used to ensure that neighbors control neighborhood change.

What changes when residents move from answering questions to setting the agenda? In this episode, Shawn talks with researcher and organizer Vedette Gavin about the Healthy Neighborhood Study, a decade-long participatory action research effort that equips residents to study—and help shape—the changes happening in their own neighborhoods. Together, they explore the difference between listening to people and sharing real control, the connection between belonging and collective power, and why community engagement should leave residents with greater authority, resources, and influence. Vedette also offers practical wisdom for leaders who want to work differently: check your ego, expect to get some things wrong, put resources directly into people, and measure success not only by what a project accomplishes, but by who holds power when it is over.

Asiaha Butler is the Co-Founder & CEO of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood. She is a Community Strategist, Real Estate Developer, Innovator, and Change Agent. I first learned about Asiaha through her leadership at Weave: The Socail Fabric Project by The Aspen Institute.Asiaha's family had been in Englewood (Chicago) for generations. And facing a season of fear and frustration, she was ready to leave.  But she caught a vision she couldn't let go of.  So she turned her fear into R.A.G.E, and for almost 20 years has been innovatively, tirelessly, and joyfully sparking neighborhood-level belonging and collective action.  Listen in as we talk about connecting youth with community elders, about convincing the city to allow residents to purchase and own vacant land in their neighborhood, about catalyzing a movement of residents into a formal association that is reshaping the neighborhood, and about what it means to co-create the future together.

Nichole Argo, a social psychologist and lead researcher on the Belonging Barometer, argues belonging actually rests on three distinct pillars — social connection, psychological safety, and agency. That third pillar becomes the episode's central idea: belonging without agency isn't really belonging at all, and communities that only extend a passive welcome — "the doors are open, come on in" — without a credible path to real influence are offering something thinner than they realize. This episode also pushes back on a common assumption that hyper-local belonging is optional in a connected, mobile world, arguing instead that proximity and shared place remain essential because they're what let people actually show up for each other, and that diverse, cross-difference relationships — not comfortable homogeneity — are what make people feel more at home, not less.

Listen in as our host and one of our producers reflect on the first half of season one, the ideals and hopes that are driving this podcast, and what we are looking forward to for the future.

In the last episode, we got a beautiful introduction to place attachment and the global Placemaking movement. In this episode, we follow up with a conversation with a veteran practitioner and national thought leader about her on-the-ground stories — of both success and struggle — in activating people for place-based change. Kady Yellow is the VP of Placemaking for the City of Jacksonville, FL. Her leadership and approach to centering resident voice, vision, and agency is truly exceptional. See how her approach of asking more, not less, has catalyzed local leadership for local impact.

Places People Change explores neighborhood belonging through three lenses: social cohesion (our trust in neighbors), collective efficacy (our belief that we can shape our future together), and sense of place — our connection to the neighborhood itself. Over the next two episodes, we dig into that final piece, also known as place attachment: the emotional bond and sense of identity that ties people to a place's history, culture, and everyday rhythms. It's about belonging to the neighborhood itself, not just the neighbors in it.Our guest, Ethan Kent, has spent 25 years building that kind of belonging through placemaking — a global, community-driven movement (born from the 1970s Project for Public Spaces) that designs parks, main streets, and public spaces around how people actually want to gather and connect. As executive director of PlacemakingX, which he founded in 2019, Ethan has worked in over a thousand cities across sixty-five countries and helped launch more than thirty regional placemaking networks. Listen in as we talk about designing places for belonging — and making our neighborhoods not just livable, but lovable.

In our previous episode, we discussed the place-based social impact movement and the meaningful results it is producing in neighborhoods around the country. We focused on the necessity for place-based efforts to be people-centered. This week, we offer a case study illustrating this approach. For the last few years, two of our team members, Producer David Park and Host Shawn Duncan, have had the joy of participating in some amazing work happening in the Franklin Park neighborhood of Allentown, PA. This week, Shawn speaks with two of the leaders shaping this phenomenal work. Dr. Samantha Shaak is the Executive Director of the Leonard Parker Pool Institute for Health, the organization serving as convener and backbone for this place-based partnership. Darian Colbert is the Executive Director of Cohesion Network, the local nonprofit that is the driving force behind the neighborhood engagement, connection, and organizing work. Listen in on this conversation about how a large healthcare system chose a place-based approach and how the partnership is catalyzing neighborhood-level belonging and shared action. 

We are living in an era of unprecedented place-based investments. The movement for neighborhood-centered social change continues to grow in exciting ways. The public, private, and nonprofit sectors are acknowledging the ways disadvantage has been deliberately concentrated in some neighborhoods and opportunity in others. And they are rallying together to reverse generations of this racialized and class-based disinvestment. Today, we speak with two leaders influencing the origins and growth of the field about why this level of investment is necessary and how we keep people at the center of the work.