Building an Organization That Can Outlast Its Founder

When Strong Towns started, there was no meaningful distinction between the movement and the organization.

There was just me.

There was a blog, a set of ideas I was struggling to explain, and a growing number of people who seemed to recognize something in those ideas that matched what they were seeing in their own places. There was no staff. No office. No board structure worthy of the name. No membership program. No annual gathering. No curriculum, no campaigns, no Local Conversations, no strategic plan.

There was just a conviction that something had gone badly wrong with the way we were building our cities, towns and neighborhoods, and that the people who lived in those places deserved a better way to understand what was happening to them.

Over time, that conviction became a conversation. The conversation became a community. The community became a movement. And the movement eventually required an organization capable of supporting it.

Watching Strong Towns grow from a set of ideas into something shared by millions of people around the world has been one of the great privileges of my life. It has also been one of the great challenges, because an organization that grows must also mature. The things that work at one stage do not always work at the next. A structure that is sufficient for a startup can become a constraint for an institution.

Healthy places mature. So do healthy organizations.

That is why I am writing today to share an important leadership transition at Strong Towns. John Reuter is joining our team as the Executive Director of Strong Towns, and I will continue serving the organization as President.

This is not a departure for me. It is not a retirement, and it is not a step away from the work. In many ways, it is the opposite. This transition will allow me to focus more fully on the work I am uniquely positioned to do: writing, speaking, teaching, fundraising, developing new ideas, and helping build the Strong Towns movement.

It will also allow John to do the work that a growing organization now needs from its chief executive: leading the team, managing operations, overseeing the budget, building systems, ensuring accountability, and translating strategy into action.

For a long time, those two jobs have been held together in one role. That made sense when Strong Towns was smaller. It no longer does.

This transition did not come out of nowhere. It is part of a longer process of organizational maturation that our board has been pursuing for some time. In our current strategic plan, we committed to strengthening governance, expanding the Board of Directors, and preparing the organization for the eventual day when Strong Towns would need to thrive without depending on its founder.

That day is not today. I am not going anywhere. But the work of building a durable organization cannot begin at the moment durability is urgently needed. One of the most common failure points for founder-led organizations is that they remain too dependent on the founder for too long, as the public voice, the strategic thinker, the manager, the fundraiser, the final decision-maker, and the institutional memory. That may work for a time, but it is not strength. It is fragility.

Strong Towns teaches that resilience comes from distributed capacity, from systems that can adapt, learn and respond without depending on a single heroic intervention. We should expect no less from ourselves.

John Reuter has been deeply involved in Strong Towns for more than a decade. He first encountered Strong Towns while serving on a city council in a small Idaho community, where he was wrestling with many of the same questions that animate our movement today: how to build financially resilient places, how to make better decisions about growth and infrastructure, and how local leaders can navigate systems that often seem designed to produce the wrong outcomes.

He invited me to Idaho in 2013 for one of Strong Towns' earliest statewide speaking tours, joined our Board of Directors in 2014, and has helped guide the organization through much of its growth, from a small advocacy effort into an international movement.

What has always impressed me about John is that he combines a deep commitment to the mission with a practical understanding of how change actually happens. Throughout his career—as a journalist, local elected official, advocate, nonprofit executive, and civic leader—he has focused on helping communities solve problems, helping people navigate complex institutions, and building organizations capable of translating good ideas into real-world results. That combination is rare.

As President, I will remain the primary public voice of Strong Towns, and I will work closely with John and the board on strategy, performance and mission alignment. I’m excited about this.

But, we should always remember that a strong town is not strong because one person has a vision for it. It is strong because many people have the capacity to care for it, invest in it, argue over it, improve it, and pass it on better than they found it. The same is true of Strong Towns, the organization. This is, and in a meaningful sense always has been, a group effort. That’s how the organization was built, and that’s how it will endure.

I am grateful to continue serving as President of Strong Towns. I am excited for John Reuter to lead as Executive Director. And I am more confident than ever that the movement we are building together is strong enough for the work ahead.

Keep doing what you can to build Strong Towns!

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If you have any questions or comments you'd like to share, or if you'd just like to join us in welcoming John to the team, you can continue this conversation with Chuck and our members over in the Strong Towns Commons!