| interest form | registration form | background | feedback form | neighborhood sound archive |

Project Background

Listening Across Neighborhoods (LAN) is an annual neighborhood-centered, youth-oriented, listening, learning, and leadership program that includes workshops, peer-to-peer interaction, and public presentations. LAN is unique in its combination of sound, education, relationship building, and leadership opportunities, with hands-on participation, encouraging individual experiences and opinions.

Listening Across Neighborhoods is intended to address two needs: neighborhood preservation in the face of investment/divestment, and relationship building/communication skills. Balancing preservation, planning, and sustainability are key elements to maintain a sense of place both for current residents and to attract new residents. Preserving a neighborhood’s character begins with an understanding of its current and historic features. In Listening Across Neighborhoods the two intersect via sound. Listening Across Neighborhoods is unique and innovative in its combination of sound and communication studies, leadership opportunities, and community participation. Also unique is the pairing of students/youth (30-40 total) from different neighborhoods giving them the opportunity to engage with each other and learn about their communities.

The communities impacted by the project are diverse Chicago neighborhoods that are suffering from disinvestment and/or rapid gentrification, resulting in lack of funding or over investment. Individuals and communities suffer from lack of investment–food deserts, crime, poverty–or are priced out of their neighborhoods by rapidly changing property values. LAN aims to use listening and public speaking to understand the current state of a neighborhood and through research and collecting sound, activate youth to become engaged in the social and political process of neighborhood development.

Goals

  • Instructor-Led Technical Learning: Sound, Recording, Storytelling, Public Speaking
  • Student-Led Learning: Neighborhood Discovery and Meaning, Introduce Model/Example
  • Deliverables: Recorded Public Presentations, Neighborhood Sound Archive

Activities

Based on a “Learning for Life” model, LAN will consist of the following four activities that build on and amplify each other to have a lasting impact on participants, their families, and their communities:

  • Learning Workshops: Sound – Listening and Learning (3 workshops), Public Speaking (1 workshop) and Public Presentations (2 presentations)
  • Data Collection and Organizing: soundwalking, recording, editing, reflecting (three weeks)
  • Public Presentations: Conversations within the Community and the City (minimum three events) to include one or more presentations in each neighborhood and at 2024 Open House Chicago
  • Neighborhood Sound Archive/Sound Map: Ongoing Archive for Community Participation and Learning.

Partners

  • Build Chicago
  • Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology
  • Guild Literary Complex
  • St Ignatius College Prep
  • YMEN
  • Theatre Y
  • New Mission Temple COGIC
  • By The Hand Club for Kids
  • Stone Temple Baptist Church
  • Walls Turned Sidways
  • Kuumba Lynx
  • Chicago Parks and Library Branches on the west side