Aqui Para Escuchar: Here to Listen

When the City of Chattanooga set out to design its first Parks and Outdoors Plan, leaders didn’t just want another blueprint for greenspace. They wanted something transformative—an effort rooted in equity, and a vision bold enough to “reinvent Chattanooga as a city in a park,” where nature connects everyone, everywhere.

But as planning kicked off, a challenge quickly surfaced. Survey responses were scarce from the very zip codes and resident groups who needed greenspace most: immigrants and working-class families with the lowest incomes and poorest health outcomes. To move forward with a successful plan, the City needed the wisdom and expertise from immigrant and work-class Chattanoogans, but they struggled to reach these communities through conventional engagement methods.

Community-Led Listening

As one resident put it, “we’ve been asked before, but nothing ever changes.” Putting these residents in the driver’s seat of their own parks was going to require a different approach. Parks staff realized that their traditional playbook, English-only surveys and public meetings at inconvenient times and places, wasn’t going to work.

Inspired by a successful outreach model developed in Honolulu, TPL offered an idea: what if the community itself led the listening? The City embraced the idea and launched the Park Listeners program, hiring and training 12 neighbors as trusted ambassadors.

These weren’t outsiders with clipboards, they were familiar faces from the soccer field, church, barbershop, or even Mrs. Kim’s Saturday fish fry in Alton Park. Many were bilingual or multilingual, and often immigrants or first-generation Americans. Their role was simple yet powerful: to gather stories, needs, and priorities—while honoring culture and language.

Amplifying Long Silenced Voices

As the program began, surveys expanded into Spanish and, for the first time, Q’anjob’al, a Mayan dialect spoken locally by Guatemalan families. For those who couldn’t read or write, Park Listeners read questions aloud. For neighbors hesitant to engage, an agua fresca or cup of coffee became an invitation to share.

Engagement thrived outside of city halls. Listeners connected with their community at food truck nights and in soccer stands, classrooms, and churches. The impact was immediate. For many immigrant and non-English-speaking families, this was the first time they were genuinely included in civic planning.

And their input proved critical. Nearly 140 hours of direct engagement and 400 survey responses revealed that these communities wanted parks where they could spend time with friends and family—but their current experiences weren’t meeting their needs.

Three priorities rose to the top. Community members in Chattanooga wanted their parks to:

• Provide basics like shade from the sun, functional, well-maintained restrooms, trash cans that were emptied regularly, and above all, a sense of safety.
• Create and nurture cultural connections through soccer fields, basketball courts, and relevant programming offered at times that work for working families.
• Be accessible, safe, welcoming spaces close to home, not just across town.

The Park Listeners program was designed to shape a plan—but it also reshaped relationships. By meeting people where they were, it validated that their voices mattered. Trust for Public Land’s staff lead for the project, Daniela Paz Peterson, recalled watching a Listener read a survey aloud in Spanish to an abuela. “I saw her shoulders drop and relief wash over her face,” Daniela said. “She realized she could participate, and that she mattered. That moment shouldn’t be rare, it should be at the core of everything we do.”

The program turned skepticism into hope, demonstrating that listening itself fosters a sense of belonging. It wasn’t just about surveys or plans. It was about people, their stories, and their future. In listening, Chattanooga didn’t just gather data—it built common ground.

Youth Leading the Future

The success of the pilot is sparking the next chapter: a Park Listeners program for youth leaders. This national initiative will train young people ages 16–24 in active listening, civic leadership, and community storytelling. Through classroom learning, fieldwork, and artifact design, youth, immigrants, refugees, Black and Latinx teens, and first-generation college students will carry forward listening as civic power, planting seeds for long-term equity in public space planning.