How 26 Strong Towns Members Reached a Million People
In an increasingly chaotic world, just a few Strong Towns members can have a huge impact on a community, and on communities across the continent. Here’s how 26 Strong Towns members reached a million people.
You can meet 11 Strong Towns members in Maumee, Ohio, which was 2024’s Strongest Town.
Marion, Ohio, winner of the 2025 Strongest Town Contest, is home to eight Strong Towns members.
There are four Strong Towns members in Brattleboro, Vermont, the 2023 champion.
Two Strong Towns members helped Lockport, Illinois, win the title in 2021.
There is just one Strong Towns member in Jasper, Indiana, which won in 2022. One person (Shout out to Mark Nowotarski!) looked at his community through the Strong Towns lens and decided that despite its challenges, it was worth investing in and worth putting in the spotlight.
Not only did Jasper earn the tens of thousands of votes necessary to secure the championship title, it’s also served as an example to hundreds of thousands of people since then.
Many Strong Towns advocates, whether they’re citizens, city councilors, or municipal staff, eventually hear the pushback: “Ok, that’s a good idea, but what city is actually doing it?” These advocates can point to Jasper, Indiana, as an example of what prioritizing maintenance and long-term financial stability can look like. They can see how Jasper observes the needs of the community and takes small, immediate steps to meet those needs.
The eight Strong Towns members in Marion, Ohio, deserve their own shout-out. James Walker, along with a team of advocates, nominated Marion for this year’s contest and drummed up a ton of local and national attention. Marion’s race toward victory was covered in more than 50 news reports and resulted in a huge positive social media response. Marion’s members did something that’s absolutely crucial for communities trying to grow stronger: they paused and said “We’ve made progress, and it’s worth celebrating.”
Brattleboro’s story reached nearly 400,000 people on YouTube alone. All thanks to four Strong Towns members.
During five years of upheaval, when many people were looking up, waiting for the next grant, the next sweeping fix, these members held up the microphone in their own cities and spoke into it—to an audience of more than a million people.
These 26 Strong Towns members said: “We’ve got this. We can face hard things in our community. We can rally, change course, and build a better place—and a better life for the people who live here.”
Every Strong Towns member makes an impact. A handful of committed advocates can inspire a town. One person can change the conversation about how cities are built everywhere. You can be that person—become a Strong Towns member today.
Strong Towns is helping local leaders, technical professionals and involved residents across North America make their communities more prosperous and financially resilient.
This movement needs you. Become a member today.
Lauren Ronnander, the Director of Communications 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.