With a background in creative writing, environmental science, and urban planning, Kelsey Zlevor is a spatial strategist and social designer at the convergence of planning policy, climate justice, and social change.

Kelsey is currently a planner in Chicago, specializing in community facilitation and public space design as a guest on ancestral land of the Council of the Three Fires. She is a board member of Women in Planning + Development, and the Association for Community Design, and an alumni of Pathways to Equity.

Kelsey is the keeper of Mental Landscapes, a body of trauma-informed design research and scholarship centering depression as a design lens to foster wellbeing in public space. Through this work, she was named the Fall 2023 Artist-In-Residence at Allerton Park and Retreat Center in Monticello, Illinois, and was a speaker at SXSW in 2024.

As a community coalition-builder, Kelsey has held multiple public offices, serving as an appointed at-large commissioner and chair of the City of Eugene Sustainability Commission, and chair of the Eugene Downtown Neighborhood Association.  She organized with Sunrise Eugene, and was a founding member of the Holiday Farm Advisory Team, a network of professionals supporting climate-resilient community recovery in light of the wildfires in 2020.

Kelsey served as an appointed member to the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development’s Middle Housing Model Code Technical Advisory Committee in 2019, tasked with developing draft model code to implement Oregon’s landmark House Bill 2001. HB 2001 legalizes multiple dwelling units in single-family zones, a key step to improving housing access and dismantling structural racism. Locally, she joined the Board of Directors of SquareOne Villages, a paradigm-shifting nonprofit developer of permanently affordable housing co-ops in Lane County, Oregon.

Enlivened by collaborative design, Kelsey was selected as a Global Talent for Unleash Lab in 2019, an immersive design challenge in Shenzhen, China centered on the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDG). She worked on an international team for SDG 13 Climate Action; Climate Disaster Preparedness & Management. She was also a fellow of the Summer Institute on Sustainability and Energy at University of Illinois-Chicago in 2014.

Originally aspiring towards an MFA in creative nonfiction before science and planning, Kelsey is an embodied communitarian: her knowledge and vision is shaped by her breadth of meaningful personal and professional relationships across many disciplines, generations, cities, and countries. These relationships helped inspire her Strategic Yes for Social Change DIY Retreat Kit, which she adapted into a six-week creative online learning cohort through Engaging Local Government Leaders. Kelsey also launched Causerie in 2022, her monthly creative newsletter community through Substack.

Zlevor holds a master’s of Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon, and a B.A. in Environmental Science from the University of Iowa. She was a graduate fellow at the Sustainable Cities Institute, the first Sustainability Liaison for UIowa Student Government, and a founding storyteller of the Climate Narrative Project. Before her planning career, she interned in the Environmental Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.