Halftime: Exploring the Origins, Lessons Learned, and Future Ideas for the Places People Change Podcast

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.

David: We're doing this episode as sort of a way to get to know you better, and to have a little meta conversation around the podcast itself. So I want to start off for listeners meeting you for the first time — who is Shawn Duncan, and what do you spend your days doing?

Shawn: Man, all right, this is going to be my least favorite question. I spend my days running my own freelance business called Congruence, where I do coaching, consulting, training, and research — specifically around leaders who are trying to find place-based solutions to the social issues they're addressing.

David: How did you get pulled into the world of place-based community development?

Shawn: It was kind of a winding path. I always knew I wanted to do something mission-related, purpose-related, in some sense — even in college I had this vague sense of wanting to make a difference in the world without really knowing what that looked like. Even going from undergrad into grad school, I largely just kept learning, because I knew I had these desires to impact the world but didn't know what to do or where to aim them. Over the years it was really a matter of continuing to seek out and learn from people who felt further down the road than me — what are you doing, how are you doing it, why are you doing it, can I come alongside and learn from you.

Twenty years ago I moved to Atlanta, and through building relationships here I got more exposed to thinking around social impact, racial justice, economic justice. The more I explored those issues, the more I built relationships with people thinking about it in terms of specific places and neighborhoods. The more I dug in, researched, practiced — the more I discovered this is the world I want to be in. It got serious maybe twelve or thirteen years ago when I began working with Focus Community Strategies, a neighborhood-based organization here in Atlanta. Joining that team was really my official full entrance into the world of place-based community development, and I've just kept digging deeper into what that looks like ever since. That world, that work, is where I've found my sense of passion and direction.

David: If you don't mind dropping a few breadcrumbs — were there books, mentors, or projects that stand out, where you thought, this is it — and then that book leads you to a person you think, this person is it?

Shawn: Yeah. Very early on — my first year living in Atlanta — my wife and I read a book by Shane Claiborne. I was on staff at a church at the time, so a lot of what I was reading around social justice was out of the faith-based, theological world. We came across Shane Claiborne's *Irresistible Revolution*, and thought, here's a Christian speaking the language we're trying to speak and doing the things we want to do. That led us to discover the CCDA — the Christian Community Development Association — a national gathering of thousands of Christians thinking this way. We went to a conference in Chicago maybe fifteen to twenty years ago and felt like we'd found the people we'd been searching for.

That led to looking at what was happening in Atlanta — I found FCS before I ever worked for them, developed a relationship with Bob Lupton, the founder, and through relationships with people who worked there began to dive in. But I think probably ten years ago, the research of Raj Chetty and Opportunity Insights moved this from a vaguely good principle — if you want to make a difference, build deep relational partnerships with a neighborhood — into something backed by hard economic and scientific research: that the scale of change that's possible in the United States is at the scale of the neighborhood, not just the individual or family. If we really want to see social change, we've got to think at a neighborhood level. All the research and networks I've connected with since have confirmed that being placed, being a good neighbor, being connected — these are true not just in a theological or philosophical way, but in a hardcore, evidence-based way. Neighborhoods are the scale of change we need to be working in.

David: It's nice to see some of that science back up our intuitions. So — you've been engaged in neighborhood-level work for a while. Why turn it into a podcast? What made you say, now I need to record conversations around a microphone?

Shawn: Because people like David Park tend to have ideas about things like this and pester you until you actually do it. Back in my days on staff at FCS, we actually started a podcast called Place Matters about four years before it wrapped up. It was my fault more than anyone's that it took as long as it did to start, because my basic assumption was that there's too much noise out there already — what's one more voice going to do. But the more I became aware that the language around place-based approaches was growing, the more I saw the gap between people who wanted to understand and practice it and the people who just didn't have the exposure yet. I had a privileged seat — part of my job was researching, reading, building relationships, gathering the networks shaping the field — so the idea was, can we create a space through a podcast to begin exposing people to place-based thinking, research, and impact.

Then, in my transition away from FCS into freelance work, you and I and others started talking about what a fun project that had been, with such good engagement and feedback. We asked, do we revive it — but we didn't have an institution behind us anymore, we were all operating independently, so how do we pull it off, where do the resources come from. We got feedback from previous listeners saying there's a gap, a need for space to introduce people to these core ideas and practices. So we sat back down at a table — me, you, Tim, and Lucas — and asked whether there was space to revive what we'd done, but laser-focus it a bit more based on what we'd learned, and still speak into place-based social impact and get more people exposed to these ideas.

David: I just love how sinister it is to be part of that conversation with you and then ask you, "hey, why'd you do this podcast?" That's diabolical of me.

Shawn: If you just need credit, man, all you've got to do is ask.

David: When we're talking about this podcast — I'm obviously a big cheerleader for you and have a strong stake in your work and in place-based development generally — who is this podcast for? Besides "you care about your neighbors," who's the primary audience?

Shawn: Probably because of my professional seat over the last fifteen years or so, my default is to think about people whose profession is thinking about social impact — that could be nonprofit people, someone in city government, healthcare, education, a business leader. I don't isolate it to one sector. There are a lot of people who wake up each day wanting to make the world better in some way — economic mobility, health inequities, racial justice, poverty — not just as a citizen who cares, which is great, but as someone who wants to leverage their profession to do it. Some of those people are aware there's this thing called "place-based" but don't know what it means, where it comes from, or how it should influence how they do their jobs. So the audience is people who are daily thinking about social change or social impact and trying to understand what it means to take a place-based approach, and how to do it well.

And even people already aware of it — I've been engaging with this for years and I still feel like I'm constantly absorbing and pursuing research and best practices, what works and what doesn't. Even the best-known networks of place-based practitioners nationally or globally feel like there's still so much to know about what actually changes outcomes. So if you're already convinced of the place-based idea but are seeking more stories, relationships, and ideas from people thinking about it in unique ways — those are the two groups this is for.

David: So, for the layman — how is a place-based approach different from other ways we think about help and development?

Shawn: I'd contrast it with two others, and I'll preface this by saying it's going to be overly simplistic — none of these are hard, distinct buckets that don't touch each other. The most common is program-based, or issue-based: there's a problem we've identified — rent, food, clothing, education, job readiness, budgeting — and we design programs to deliver resources, services, or skills to people so their lives improve. Those things are necessary and good, but it's a point-solution way of thinking, irrespective of where you live — if you fit the category of need, the program is for you.

A move toward place-thinking from there — I'd actually call it "based in a place," not place-based — is delivering those same programs and services, but only within a geographic boundary you've designed. That's fine to do, but simply drawing a geographic boundary around your service delivery isn't place-based work; it's still program-based work that now has geographic boundaries. It can be a healthier approach, because you're not spread thin, you can build deeper relationships and stronger, more proximate partnerships — but it's still fundamentally about the program.

Place-based work, though it will also have programs and services, asks a different question: what is it about this place and its systems that's generating or hindering opportunity — for the kids growing up here, the adults, the seniors? What is it about this neighborhood's ecosystem that's generating or hindering well-being? Place-based work is concerned with making the place itself a generator of well-being and opportunity, because what the research shows is that neighborhoods have an independent influence on life outcomes — two people born into identical demographic and economic circumstances will have very different outcomes if they grow up in two different neighborhoods, and it isn't explained away by family income, race, or education. The place itself exerts an independent influence. So place-based work asks: how do we change the systems of this place to generate more opportunity for the people who live here?

David: If I were to make a quick metaphor — one is a boutique shop, we just sell screws and hammers and nails, versus a Walmart trying to be everything to everyone everywhere. A place-based approach is specific to that place, trying to make sure it's not just about random things for consumption from a location that centers the supplier — it's almost a whole new way of doing economy, getting more people living there, contributing, becoming producers and consumers of that place so everyone can thrive. As opposed to just extraction, or "here's a new market for us." I don't know if that metaphor totally works.

I think in some ways the place-based approach is an evolution that's come about because of big data and a more systemic approach to change. And I think that's part of why it's hard to absorb — a lot of us think, I see a problem, I see a need, I meet it, what's wrong with that? And the answer is, if you don't know how the need got there, that might be your problem.

Shawn: Yeah — and I'd want us to resist the framing that one is bad and ineffective and the other is good and effective. As an individual citizen, neighbor, human being, seeing a need and meeting it is a good and beautiful thing. We need more people who instinctively engage the world with generosity — let's keep being those people, let's get even better at it. Because as an individual, I'm not going to have the capacity, power, agency, or resources to change the neighborhood I live in on my own. This isn't saying the program stuff doesn't work — it's great, it takes a lot of pain and struggle off people's plates and brings real relief and support to families. Let's keep doing that.

But at some level we also need a coalition of people with the agency and capacity to convene at the 20,000-foot level and ask: why are so many kids struggling in our schools, why is there so much underemployment here, why is there a safety problem here — what's generating these concerns in this neighborhood, and can we work together across sectors to change it, so the people doing the generous, urgent work aren't having to do ten times more of it five or ten years from now. It's a both-and, not an either-or. But once you start asking place questions, you realize generosity alone isn't a powerful enough engine to change the system — it's going to take a coordinated approach, looking hard at the systems we live in and asking hard questions about how to make them equitable, how to make them build power and create opportunity rather than stifle it.

David: That's well said. I think the way I might have framed it before is that some people don't need to be at this table — but you're right, everybody can play the helping-others game. You said this place-based approach comes out of the work of Raj Chetty and others with much longer titles than either of us. Is this a trend, or is it a bigger moment? What do you think about the future of place-based development?

Shawn: I think there's a case for both. Rob did a good job naming this in the first episode — thinking and living and working at the scale of what we'd now call "neighborhood," a tighter, more proximate community, is about as old as human civilization. In a lot of ways we may be having a moment of realization in the Western world right now, which is necessary and good to be celebrated. But our displaced way of thinking and living — where my address means nothing to my identity, my job, my friends, my spirituality — is actually way newer than the place-based movement. That lack of seeing place as an actor in our lives has more to do with the "trend" side of things. If you look at the scale of human history, automobiles are a trend — they're not going anywhere, but they're a pretty new thing. The internet is very new. And that trend is having disastrous effects on human community, well-being, relationships, connection — the research bears out that these displaced, disembodied lives we live are actually pretty harmful. So in a broader historical context, place-based thinking — even if that language hasn't always been used — is more natural to how human communities have solved problems, or created them, at that scale.

What we're seeing now, I wouldn't call a trend so much as an emerging movement, field, or industry — a lot of people working hard to build some real definition around it. At one point public health wasn't an industry either — we had hospitals and healthcare, but the idea of outside-the-hospital interventions that generate better health outcomes wasn't something you could go get a degree in and build a career around. We're at a similarly early stage with place-based work. You can trace the roots back to Jane Jacobs, William Julius Wilson, voices from forty or fifty years ago talking about how cities are designed and how neighborhoods generate life outcomes — those were the seeds of what we're talking about today. But the movement or field we're seeing now is more in the ten-to-fifteen-year range, with a lot of increased energy over the last five years.

Where the trend piece comes in is that the language of "place-based" is getting used more and more, often loosely, for things that aren't really place-based. I did a Google Ngram search on the phrase — I think I mentioned this in a previous episode — and since the year 2000 its presence in searchable literature has gone up 543%. So more and more people are talking about place-based work, which is part of why there's energy now around not gatekeeping the term, but building real core practices, values, and commitments around what it actually means to change life outcomes by changing the places people live in.

David: I wonder how much of that is just because we were all stuck in one place during COVID, thinking "explain this place to me, help me get out of here, what's wrong with this place."

Shawn: That might have helped — "this place sucks, I'm so tired of this place."

David: I appreciate that you're saying place-based work isn't just a matter of city planning, architecture, design, or space planning. You started this first season with belonging — where does belonging fit into place-based change, and why start there?

Shawn: As we were designing how to reboot and take next steps from the previous podcast, the piece that was really clear to me is that as the place-based movement gains more traction, definition, investment, and evidence, what I wanted this podcast to focus on is the people-centered approaches to place-based work. There are place-based interventions that are just about mixed-income housing, cradle-to-career education, economic vitality — pick your domain — that focus on what you could call the hard infrastructure of a neighborhood: clean up blighted properties, improve the school system, make starting a business easier. Yes to all of that — but it can be big-systems, top-down work, versus work that comes deeply from in and with people.

So starting this season, and hopefully going forward, I wanted to keep the focus on belonging, agency, and connectedness — that level of trust and cohesion, person to person and person to institution within a neighborhood. You don't make places better just by building nicer things, even though that can be necessary. I appreciated how both Ethan and Kady talked about placemaking — it's not just about activating a park to make it prettier and more accessible, as important as that is, it's about activating people to care more about their neighbors and neighborhoods, and about their agency in shaping those places. That's what belonging is to me — not just that I have a couple of good friends, but that I belong to my neighborhood, I belong to its future, I want to shape it, and I belong to my neighbors.

If there's a narrowing of focus from the first podcast to this one, it's making it about people-centered, place-based approaches rather than just the policy or zoning changes, or how to do mixed-income housing better. I'd never disparage any of that — we need public art, better sidewalks, better parks, beautiful, creative, fun, engaging spaces. But how we get there really matters — we can professionalize it and have it handed down by generous people with money to spend, or we can drive it with and alongside the neighbors and residents of those places. That sense of belonging, collective efficacy, and social cohesion — if I can add anything to the placemaking world, I want to be another voice echoing out those stories of people-centered, place-based change.

David: Going back to your earlier answer on audience — it's anyone who cares about engaging people in this larger view of place, because that's where both the hardest obstacles and the greatest joys are: when people gather, and how we create a sense of ownership and collective enjoyment of a place.

That was actually kind of fun to see over the last month or two with the World Cup — people going to watch games together, cheering together or against each other. So much fun to see that kind of interactivity.

Shawn: Yeah — Atlanta hosted eight games, and tickets were basically your firstborn and half your mortgage, but I had a friend with some connections who got a reasonably priced ticket, so I made it to one game. Honestly, the most joyful part wasn't even the game itself, though that was awesome — it was downtown, the streets active, people sitting outside. The game was at noon, so we were out there at nine-thirty, ten in the morning, and there were already people out — kids and adults playing soccer against each other with a tiny ball and tiny goals in the middle of the street.

And that's not just a World Cup phenomenon — plenty of cities I've traveled to, especially in Europe, have a sidewalk-cafe, outdoor culture that's so much stronger than in most of our cities. Cities you wouldn't necessarily point to as wealthy or powerful still have this beautiful, prominent culture of outdoor space and gathering. For me it was a model of what our cities can be. Atlanta does something called Streets Alive, where they'll shut down a set of blocks and say cars aren't allowed — come hang out, ride your bike, walk, set up a canopy if you want to sell something. That's what cities should do: generate belonging and connection. If we do place-based work well, we don't just make housing more affordable and stable, or schools better for our kids — we make neighborhoods more fun, more beautiful, more connected, more meaningful. There should be an emotive part of us that feels connected to the people who are there, and that doesn't happen sitting inside my house all the time — it happens because my place has been designed to bring me into it with other people.

David: That's a beautiful picture. We're four episodes in — was there a moment or an episode where you thought, this is what makes the whole podcast worth it, right here? Any gems you can drop on us?

Shawn: Yeah — one is when people started talking about the neighborhoods that shaped them growing up. I love those moments, because it shakes us out of speaking as experts or practitioners and gets down to, this is the way living on that block impacted my life. Those stories have been really special.

And with Kady — talking about the number of people engaging in the neighborhood work she's doing, and not just the number, but the overwhelming amount of investment people are expected to give, and happily give — that really landed for me. The answer to community or resident engagement isn't asking less and making it easier, it's actually raising the stakes and making it more meaningful. Asking more gets you further than asking less. Having worked with so many neighborhoods and organizations over the last fifteen years, this is a perennial concern everywhere — how do you generate and sustain resident leadership and engagement in a way that isn't just an annual block party or a once-every-five-years door-knocking survey. There's no quick fix, but seeing someone actually create more meaningful engagement by asking more of people — that's the kind of thing I want these stories and episodes to do: to generate a fresh sense of what it looks like to pursue massive, system-wide change to make neighborhoods more opportunity-rich, while activating people in a powerful and creative way.

David: Kady was especially inspiring to me — I usually try to bother people less, try not to inconvenience them. For her to say, if you want a better neighborhood, we're not going to get there by leaving people alone, we've got to lean in — I really appreciated that.

As a producer and listener of this show, I've been curious where you might want to take us. Four episodes in, hopefully many more seasons to come — what would you like this podcast, Places People Change, to become?

Shawn: We've got four down and four more to go for season one. What's happening now is setting the mold, the trajectory I hope this keeps following, and for me it's a bit of a dual thing. I want more and more stories — here are the places, here are the people, here's how these everyday residents are participating in place-based change, which requires massive cross-sector, system-wide investment. That's the tension: individual people, and systems that are so large and complex — you can bring all the generosity in the world, but it takes coordinated work to address these big systems. So I want more stories of individual people leveraging agency and belonging to participate in that system-wide change, to create neighborhoods that are more opportunity-rich.

And the other piece is evidence. As an industry, a movement, a field, we need more exposure to what the evidence tells us about what works and what doesn't. Just this year, Raj Chetty's team released an important report in January 2026 — more evidence on the roughly seventeen billion dollars that's been invested in this kind of place-based work, where the results have been marginal, and where they've been really powerful. I want more of that. The OECD also just released a massive report, maybe a month ago, looking at place-based investment work across Germany, England, the US, and a handful of other countries. As the field produces more evidence, I want both that and the ground-level stories — here's an individual person gathering with their neighbors, here's the work they're doing to shape their neighborhood. I think episode one tried to oscillate between bigger-picture thought leadership and ground-level case study, and my hope is we get more and more of both going forward — the evidence the field is producing, the best practices we can learn from, and the people and stories that need to shape how we actually do this work.

David: I think that's going to be really exciting, both at the data level and at the level of individual stories — courage, inspiration, even mistakes made. As a practitioner and a listener, that helps me believe I can also participate, contribute, make mistakes, and still pick myself up and try again. As a listener, I have to ask — would you consider return visits to different places in future seasons? I'd love to hear more from our friends in Franklin Park, or go back to Jacksonville and see what new things Kady Yellow is starting, or talk to Ethan about how much this can grow and how we network better to create more sustainable ways of building community.

Shawn: I don't know how we figure this out yet, producer David Park, but I do think true to place-based change, you need people operating at a lot of different levels. The conversation with Darian and Samantha in Allentown was a way of saying: here's an on-the-ground, day-in-day-out practitioner in Darian, and here's a backbone organization in Sam, a little less close to the ground than Darian but deeply supportive of the work. So we tried, a little, to show two people from the same neighborhood operating at different levels of the ecosystem.

I'd love to gather more stories from within the same neighborhood — someone operating at a regional level with concern for this neighborhood, and how they're impacting it from 40,000 feet, alongside a neighbor for whom this isn't their job or what they're paid to think about, just someone engaged as a citizen. I'd love to gather stories from across the different layers of the ecosystem. I think, in a broader sense, we'll get people representing different seats in this place-based-change work as we go. But it's intriguing to think about whether we could do multiple conversations about the same neighborhood, from people at different layers of the system, and see how their engagement looks different. I like that approach — getting really deep and looking at the different angles of how things are evolving in one particular place.

David: I can't wait to get there. I'm going to back up — this will probably be for Tim to edit in earlier — I should have opened with this question, Shawn: what places have changed you?

Shawn: I'll focus mostly on one. I grew up in a small town north of Nashville, then lived in the city of Nashville as I became an adult, in college and my first few years out of it — there are certainly stories to tell about that and its impact on my life. But in deeper connection to this work, choosing about twenty-one years ago to move to Atlanta — specifically the northeast side, the Clarkston and Tucker communities — has profoundly shaped and reshaped my sense of identity, direction, and purpose.

In the years I lived in Nashville before moving to Atlanta, I think a lot of these ideals were taking shape in me, but I was living in a pretty homogeneous world — religiously, economically, racially, culturally, pretty much everywhere I looked looked like me. Not that that's true of all of Nashville, just the slice of the pie I was living in. When I landed in Atlanta — literally, I parked the moving truck, took it back, got in my car to go find somewhere to eat, and couldn't read any of the languages on the restaurant signs around me — I didn't know where I was or what to eat. From day one it was clear this wasn't the world I'd inhabited for my first twenty-five years; this was a completely different space.

And being in a majority-minority city, one that's the heartbeat of the civil rights movement — what that means for the city, for the education and learning and relationships available there, and especially the neighbors I've had the privilege of being loved and welcomed by from all over the world — what I thought I knew about hospitality, neighboring, or generosity has mostly been blown out of the water by people who aren't doing it because it's some big conceptual value they picked up in a college classroom about how they're going to change the world. It's just who they are as people. There's a way of being in the world that's so much more hospitable, generous, and open than I'd known. Those relationships, cascading from all of that, have undone me in a lot of ways, and I'm still trying to put the pieces back together from it all.

David: Amen to that. I'm excited for how this podcast develops and grows — we'll check in occasionally to process a little as the journey continues, talk about what's up ahead, and cover the ground we've already walked. Thanks a lot, Shawn.

Shawn: Awesome. Yeah, thanks, David. Good to chat.