Posts by Strong Towns
Charles Marohn

Charles Marohn—known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues—is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and civil engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.

Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019) and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley 2021). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America.

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Sarah Davis

Sarah was the Strong Towns 2021 Summer Intern, in partnership with Urban3. Sarah graduated with a bachelor's degree in Urban Planning & Design from the University of Missouri–Kansas City in May of 2021. She is passionate about neighborhoods and advocating for the individuals within them. Her goal is to use her planning education to support practices that help strengthen communities. She also enjoys traveling, hanging out with her dogs, and experimenting with vegan baking.

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Michelle Erfurt

Michelle Erfurt serves as Strong Towns' Event Pathfinder. Guided by a passion for helping people, her first career was in music therapy. She spent her clinical years working to decrease pain, improve coping, and enhance interpersonal relationships of hospice and hospitalized patients.

Those therapeutic skills have served her well. In her work at Strong Towns, Michelle navigates people through the process of bringing a Strong Towns event to their area in a way that helps them achieve their goals to help build a stronger place.

Would you like to bring Strong Towns staff to your town for a speaking engagement? Please email Michelle.

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Lauren Ronnander

Lauren Ronnander, the Communications Manager for Strong Towns, is an actual idealist who loves making things and double-spacing the end of sentences. Before joining the Strong Towns team in 2020, she worked as a journalist and an editor. She lives with her husband and an almost uncountable number of animals (including cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, and rabbits) in a super-awesome neighborhood in the American Midwest. Her experience in the Alaska Bush, downtown living in an up-and-coming Midwestern city, and now residing in a rural Chippewa Valley, Wisconsin, community has provided her with precious insight into the many ways our places can grow stronger.

Are you a member of the media and want to talk about Strong Towns? Email Lauren.

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Daniel Herriges

Daniel Herriges serves as Editor-in-Chief for Strong Towns, writing feature articles and speaking across the country on behalf of the organization. He has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development. He grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, before moving west to the San Francisco Bay Area, and later east to Sarasota, Florida, where he lives with his wife, daughter, son, and too many pets.

Daniel’s obsession with maps began before he could read; a general fascination with cities and how they work was soon to follow. He can often be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods (of his own town or another) on foot or bicycle. Daniel’s lifelong environmentalism can also be traced all the way back to age 4, when he yelled at his parents for stepping on weeds growing in sidewalk cracks.

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Abby Kinney

Abby Kinney is the cohost of the Upzoned podcast. Abby is an urban design and planning consultant at Multistudio in Kansas City, Missouri. In her own community, she works to advance bottom-up strategies that enhance both private development and the public realm, and facilitates the ad-hoc Kansas City chapter of the Incremental Development Alliance. When she’s not geeking out over cities, Abby is an avid urban mountain biker (because: potholes), audiobook and podcast junkie, amateur rock climber, and guitarist. You can connect with Abby on Twitter at @abbykatkc.

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Alexa Mendieta

Alexa Mendieta serves as a Development Associate for Strong Towns. After graduating from the University of Richmond, she worked at Historic St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, where Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Now she is excited to be sharing the Strong Towns movement and working to make towns more for the people. Outside of work, she enjoys going on walks, houseplants and gardening, and dreaming of the day when she’ll own a dog.

Are you interested in strategically supporting the Strong Towns mission? Get in touch with Alexa.

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John Pattison

John Pattison is the Community Builder for Strong Towns. He is the author of two books, most recently Slow Church (IVP), which takes inspiration from Slow Food and the other Slow movements to help faith communities reimagine how they live life together in the neighborhood. John and his family live in Silverton, Oregon. You can connect with him on Twitter at @johnepattison.

Want to start a Local Conversation, or implement the Strong Towns approach in your community? Email John.

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Andrew Price

Andrew Price (Twitter: @AndrewAPrice) has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2013 and is a founding member of the organization. Andrew is a software developer by day and an urbanist by night. He is passionate about traditional urbanism – he believes in fine-grained, highly walkable places that are built for people. He grew up in Australia and now lives in the United States with his wife. Andrew is a regular contributor on Strong Towns and runs his own blog, andrewalexanderprice.com. You can find many of his photographs throughout the Strong Towns website. Andrew’s motivation to be involved in Strong Towns and urbanism is to create a great place that he and his wife, and one day their children and their future generations will want to call home.

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Sarah Kobos

Sarah Kobos has been a regular contributor for Strong Towns since 2016. She is an urban design nerd and community activist from Tulsa, OK. Her superpower is the ability to transform almost any topic into a conversation about zoning. Whenever possible, she explores other cities and writes about urban design and land use issues at AccidentalUrbanist.com.

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Austin Maitland

Austin Maitland has been a contributor to Strong Towns since 2017. A native of Rochester, New York, Austin graduated from Rutgers University with a Master of City and Regional Planning degree in 2018. He now works as an urban planner in New Jersey. He is particularly interested in observing how land-use regulations and the built environment impact the social and economic performance of urban neighborhoods. Austin enjoys traveling around the northeast experiencing cities and towns of all shapes and sizes.

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Robert Sulaski

Robert Sulaski is an intern with Strong Towns and the geoanalytics firm, Urban3, for the summer of 2019. Rob is pursuing an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in Media and Journalism, concentrating in Interactive Multimedia, with a minor in City Planning and Urban Studies. Growing up in the Asheville area has given him a love for the outdoors, southern hospitality and good beer.

Rob is a storyteller at heart with a passion for exciting, walkable communities. With previous digital communications experience, he is excited to use these skills in the context of planning. Prior to joining Strong Towns and Urban3, he studied in Pamplona, Spain where he found an even deeper appreciation for urbanism and also produced a study abroad/travel podcast, sharpening his storytelling skills. He will be writing about Urban3’s work throughout summer 2019 before returning to UNC for his senior year.

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Alexander Dukes

Alexander Dukes (Twitter | LinkedIn) has been a regular contributor for Strong Towns since 2016, and works as a Community Planner for the US Air Force in California. He is a graduate of Tuskegee University and Auburn University, with a Bachelor’s in Political Science and Master’s degrees in Community Planning and Public Administration. With this background, Alexander focuses his planning work on public policy and urban design for both military and civilian applications. Alexander's goal is to build sustainable human environments that provide all citizens with access to cohesive communities, affordable housing, meaningful employment, and beautiful places.

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Rachel Quednau

Rachel Quednau serves as Program Director, managing the content team at Strong Towns, as well as hosting our Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. Trained in dialogue facilitation and mediation, she is devoted to building understanding across lines of difference. Previously, Rachel worked for several organizations fighting to end homelessness and promote safe, affordable housing at the federal and local levels. Rachel also served as Content Manager for Strong Towns from 2015-2018. A native Minnesotan and honorary Wisconsinite, Rachel received a Masters in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School and a Certificate in Conflict Transformation from the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium, both in 2020. She currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband Jack and son Marshall. One of her favorite ways to get to know a new city is by going for a walk in it.

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Spencer Gardner

Spencer Gardner has been writing for Strong Towns since 2016. He is a transportation planner based in Spokane, WA, who spends his spare time chasing his children, riding bikes, and doing hobbyist computer programming. He's also getting started on his own missing middle development project in Spokane's West Central neighborhood.

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Sara Joy Proppe

Sara Joy Proppe has been a regular contributor for Strong Towns since 2016. She works by day as a Project Manager in real estate development in the Twin Cities where she oversees a variety of mixed-use and multifamily historic and urban infill projects. In her free time, she is developing Proximity Project to educate and activate churches to be stewards of the built environment. She loves to write and speak on the connections between theology and our design and use of physical space.

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Nate Hood

Nathaniel Hood has been a regular contributor for Strong Towns since 2011 and was the first person to ever donate money to Strong Towns. He is a founding member of Streets.MN and lives in St. Paul. Nate can be found online at Thoughts on the Urban Environment and Streets.MN. Nate also runs a weekly newsletter that includes two short, smart, witty paragraphs, and one local Twin Cities recommendation. You can sign up here.

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Gracen Johnson

Gracen creates educational tools and experiences that help regular people build places and livelihoods that fill them with pride. She is a co-founder and the content director of the Incremental Development Alliance, a non-profit that trains locals to construct or repair the essentials of a strong neighbourhood. Before that, Gracen designed and managed the Summer Institute, an entrepreneurship accelerator for place-based businesses. Her dream is to live on a street filled with family, friends, music, gardening, and her big brother’s cooking.

Instagram | Twitter | Website

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