Emma Durand-Wood likes walkable cities, front porches, street trees, bumping into neighbors, riding her bike, downtowns, and any excuse to check out a new coffee shop, bakery, or shop. A Winnipegger by choice, she lives in Elmwood with her husband and three children. You can connect with her on Twitter @emmaewood.
Read MoreEvan Pesch is the Web and Graphic Designer for Strong Towns. Raised in a household with a local historian and a city planner in Muskegon, Michigan (our 2018 Strongest Town Contest winner), he’s always found a way to tie his own interest in design and creative work back to the city he called home. After creating several projects to get involved in his community, he left to get a bachelor’s degree studying user experience design at the University of Michigan. He later bounced around as a designer, web developer, and artist for numerous organizations before returning to his hometown in search of new ways to apply his varied skillset to improve the city he loves. If you want to find him, just visit Muskegon’s Lakeshore Trail. He’ll likely wander by you soon.
Read MoreAsia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.
Read MoreMichael Pasternock is the Video Producer for Strong Towns. After graduating from the University of Missouri, he taught high school English and government in CoMo. Mike and his wife then moved to Arizona, making his side-hustle wedding filmmaking business his full-time job. Mike also worked as chief editor for several prominent YouTubers around the Phoenix area. After discovering Strong Towns and resonating with the message, he realized that his hometown of Chicago was a better fit for his family’s lifestyle. He now lives near the lake and loves to document his travels on camera, play board games with friends, and explore the many delicious restaurants near his lively neighborhood.
Read MoreBen Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.
Read MoreTony Harris is the Action Team Coordinator at Strong Towns. Tony was drawn to further his career with Strong Towns because the organization places collective well-being, incremental action, and humility at the center of its approach to critiquing development patterns and catalyzing community growth. Prior to joining the team, Tony worked in operations and communications with start-up ventures operating across the renewable energy and collaborative technology markets. His vocational experience spans across project management, process design, facilitation, fundraising, and organizational development. Tony holds a Master of Arts in conflict transformation from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. He currently calls Annapolis, Maryland, home and spends a lot of his free time by the Chesapeake Bay.
Read MoreEdward Erfurt is the Director of Community Action at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.
Read MoreNorm Van Eeden Petersman is the Member Advocate at Strong Towns. He is an energetic enthusiast for the work that Strong Towns members do around the world. He is a skilled communicator and community builder. He leads Deltans for People-Oriented Places, a Local Conversations group, and is a leader of the Strong Towns Toastmasters Club.
Norm has a Master of Divinity and a Bachelor in Political Studies. He spent 10 years pastoring churches in Canada as a preacher, teacher, and leader. He worked in communications for the second-largest city in British Columbia and carried out stakeholder outreach for Canada's Minister of Health in Ottawa.
Norm has published articles on housing, transportation, faith, and culture and his writing appears regularly on the Strong Towns site. You can connect with him on Twitter at @normvep or on LinkedIn.
Read MoreSeth Zeren is a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer, advocate, and educator. Seth is a founding member of Strong Towns and occasional contributor over the years. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to the East Coast for college and settling down in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife and two young kids. He writes at Build the Next Right Thing.
Read MoreTayana Panova served as the Social Community Specialist at Strong Towns. She holds a PhD in psychology, with a specialization in how technology and psychology interact. Her research has led her to understand that technology is often used as an outlet for needs not satisfied by the built environment, which is why she has developed a passion for building healthy and vibrant communities. Her years living in Chicago and its suburbs, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Bulgaria, and New York have given her a unique perspective on different kinds of urban life. Follow her on Twitter at @DrTBPanova.
Read MoreSeairra Sheppard serves as the Staff Writer/Multimedia Creator for Strong Towns. As a journalist and videographer, she loves to capture ideas and share them through different mediums. Her experiences filming and writing around the world have given her a perspective on how people of different cities build their communities and thrive. She has a passion for walkability in towns, accessible recreation, fresh food availability, health, and sustainability. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our cities stronger, you can find her outside working on a farm, writing her own stories, reading, or exploring the world on a hike.
Read MoreMichel Durand-Wood lives in the Winnipeg neighborhood of Elmwood with his wife and three children. He writes at DearWinnipeg.com, a really fun blog about infrastructure and municipal finance. He has no formal training or education in city planning, municipal finance, infrastructure maintenance, or anything else he talks about. He's just a guy, in love with a city, asking it to make better use of his tax dollars.
Read MoreGrace Whatley is a Development Associate at Strong Towns, focusing on grants and major donors. Growing up in small-town New England, she is a proponent of strong rural communities and the wilderness around them. Prior to joining the Strong Towns team, Grace lived and worked in the remote community of Green River, Utah, where she facilitated an artist residency, managed small-scale downtown revitalization projects, and secured grant funding from private and public sources. She is also an artist herself, working in various printmaking, drawing, and painting mediums. Grace is now relocating from Utah to East Texas with her cat, Winnie, and is eager to explore a new region through the Strong Towns lens.
Are you interested in strategically supporting the Strong Towns mission? Get in touch with Grace.
Read MoreKarla Theilen is the Neighborhood Storyteller at Strong Towns. Karla is a writer, storyteller, and Registered Nurse based out of Missoula, Montana. Her penchant to explore wild places informed early career choices as a trail builder in the Grand Canyon, and a forest fire lookout in Idaho. Her current writing inspiration comes from a different kind of wilderness, navigating healing journeys with her patients in far-flung places where she works as a travel nurse. Her writing has been featured on NPR, and select stories and essays have been anthologized. She has been Facebook-free since 1972.
Read MoreJay Stange is an experienced community development consultant, journalist, grassroots organizer, musician, teacher, and off-grid project manager. Raised in Alaska, his passions include transforming transportation systems and making it easier to live closer to where we work, play, and do our daily rounds. Find him shopping for groceries on his cargo bike, gardening, and coaching soccer in West Hartford, Connecticut, where he lives with his family. You can connect with him on Twitter at @corvidity.
Read MoreAlissa Danckaert-Skovira teaches writing at Kent State University. She has a background in English and history, and she enjoys anything and everything to do with research and writing. Her interests include historic preservation, politics, gardening, and all things Akron.
Read MoreJen Jones Donatelli is a Cleveland-based author and journalist. Currently, she is the editor of FreshWater Cleveland, an online publication that covers the people, places, and projects shaping and transforming Cleveland. She is also a contributing editor for Destination Cleveland’s city guides and has written for other regional publications including Cleveland Magazine and Ohio Today. On a national level, her work has appeared in GOOD, Redbook, Budget Travel, Robb Report, Los Angeles Confidential, and more.
You can find Jen on Twitter at @creativegroove and @FreshWaterCLE.
Jen writes as part of an ongoing engagement with Akron, Ohio, supported by the Knight Foundation. Learn more about it here.
Read MoreLaura Dorwart has written for The New York Times, SheKnows, Bustle, Bitch, VICE, Catapult, McSweeney's, and HuffPost, among other outlets. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University and was a Fletcher B. Jones Dissertation Fellow at UC San Diego. She lives in Ohio.
Read MoreKailey Sherrick lives in Wooster, Ohio and works as a Social Media Manager. She's a recent graduate of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) program, where she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Besides writing, Kailey enjoys playing softball, gardening, spending time with her family, and being involved in her community.
Read MoreJason Schaefer served as Strong Towns' Member Support Specialist from 2015-2016. Jason has always had a strong interest in cities and has lived in some great ones, including Almuñécar, Spain; Missoula, MT; Boston, MA; Washington, DC; Fargo, ND; and, of course, Grand Forks, ND. Last year, he was awarded a McCloy Fellowship to study urban sustainability initiatives while visiting Amsterdam and seven cities across Germany.
He is very involved in urbanism efforts in his hometown of Grand Forks, ND where he sits on the boards of the Downtown Development Association and the US Green Building Council - North Dakota chapter. He was a featured speaker at TEDx Grand Forks where he shared his vision for a transit and development corridor.
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