In 2017, the Village of Yellow Springs’ Arts and Culture Commission hung banners on the north and south ends of Xenia Avenue in Yellow Springs. The banners’ message, “Kind Ness,“ is intended to spur conversation and reflection about community values. (Photo by Dylan Taylor-Lehman)
Villager gives the gift of listening
- Published: December 26, 2025
Even in a small town, where people tend to know and be known by their neighbors, it’s not unusual for folks to feel alone around the holidays. With that in mind, one Yellow Springs villager is trying to meet that feeling head-on, offering a simple gift: half an hour of conversation.
In this week’s classifieds, readers may notice a small ad from villager Joanne Lakomski. It reads: “Giving thanks to the YS Community — Offering free ‘30-minute conversations/dialogues’ to interested villagers, through December. I am a coach and HR professional, and I am available to fellow villagers looking for a sounding board or wanting to celebrate something or just looking for a good conversation. (Not a therapist — sorry.)”
Lakomski has lived in the village off and on, beginning with her time as an Antioch College student in the 1980s; she departed in the late ’90s and returned in 2015, after which she served for several years as chief human resources officer at her alma mater. She now offers coaching and consulting services.
Her path has also run through the sciences; in speaking with the News this week, she said the biology degree she earned at Antioch helped her not only in her later work as a chemical department manager at YSI — “I could grow fungi on purpose, and that was important for the job,” she said — but with what would become many years of work in human resources.
“It works out, because humans are biological creatures,” she said with a laugh.
She pointed to Malte von Matthiessen as a mentor during her time at YSI, saying she believed his “way of looking at work and organizations was probably different than most CEOs, more humanistic,” and helped her develop a truly human-centered view of human resources, organizations and the people inside them.
“It’s about helping the organization and the people make it work,” she said.
Lakomski said she recently spent time in the Cleveland area with her 93-year-old mother, and that visit planted the seed for this week’s classified ad. Her mother, she said, doesn’t have many people to talk with day to day. Conversation, in that setting, she said, can feel less like small talk and more like care.
“It’s a gift I can give her,” Lakomski said. “And I recognize coaching is a gift I give, and so why don’t I just give the gift of hearing people and listening to people? I don’t have a ton of money, and so it felt like something I could do that would be acceptable in Yellow Springs.”
Lakomski’s classified ad makes it clear that she’s “not a therapist,” and Lakomski said she is careful about that line. Her professional life in HR and coaching has meant years of being a sounding board for people at work, but not in a clinical sense. She talked about different “kinds” of listening: “There’s hearing here, hearing here, hearing here” she said, gesturing toward her ears, her head, her heart, “hearing in your gut and giving people a chance to express and figure it out. And many of us are verbal processors — the more we talk, the more we kind of get it going.”
Part of what she’s offering, then, is space and time, where the point is not to fix anything for the other person, but to let them talk long enough “to hear themselves.” Having studied some of the neuroscience behind coaching, she said, truly engaging with other folks — and new folks — is a good way to “develop new neural pathways.”
“You know how often we have an engagement with someone where we say, ‘Hi, how are you? I’m fine,’” she said. “It’s thoughtless — it’s a script — but when you go in a different direction, then you’re out of your rut. … One of the frames for it is, am I ‘it-ing’ you, or am I ‘thou-ing’ you? In one, you’re a tool, and in the other, you are human.”
Citing the time she spent in the Peace Corps in South Africa before returning to the village a decade ago, she pointed to a common South African Zulu greeting, “sawubona” — very loosely translated as “hello,” but more closely translated as “I see you.” A traditional response to the greeting is “sikhona” — “I am here.”
“I’m heartily aware that we often walk around not really feeling seen,” she said.
The half-hour conversations Lakomski is offering aren’t tightly defined, she said. Someone might want to talk through something that’s on their mind, share good news or simply sit with another person.
“I don’t know how it will go, and they might not either,” Lakomski said. “But if you have your ball and you’re bouncing it against the wall, I can be the wall.”
And she added that though she has years of professional experience in listening, the gift she’s offering this year is something any of us can give, if we so choose.
“You don’t need to have titles or anything to be human,” she said.
See Lakomski’s ad in the “Classifieds” section of the last two weeks’ issues of the News under the “Free Offers” heading.
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