App developers are promising that any citizen with a smart phone can take part in planning their city like never before. But is there more to community engagement than what you can fit within the borders of a screen?
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Jacqueline Hannah—assistant director at the Food Co-op Initiative—shares how you can start a neighborhood grocery co-op in your town, including how to pitch the vision to community members and elected officials, how to translate your enthusiasm into action, and how the Food Co-op initiative can help through every step of the process.
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Jeff Eidson—founder of Explore Elkin—shares story behind the idea Explore Elkin and how listeners can successfully create similar groups in their own cities and towns, including how to find and pitch a shared vision to residents, how to motivate residents stuck in a psychology of decline towards their city or town, and how to use the funds generated towards small bets.
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Joanna Jurgens, Head of Business Affairs at Sofar Sounds, shares how you can foster a local music scene in your community, including how to awaken that DIY spirit that’s so essential to kickstarting a local music scene, how to identify low risk strategies for creating a venue, and how to get local elected officials involved in the process.
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It’s not just those who work in or with local government who have something to offer to the Strong Towns movement. Our work touches on deeper questions of how we live in community, and this is why we seek to learn from psychologists, philosophers, historians, and—in one classic 2013 podcast interview—even a religious scholar.
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Four years ago, a fellow civil engineer in Minnesota tried (unsuccessfully) to challenge Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn’s license, in retaliation for Strong Towns’s criticism of infrastructure lobbying organizations. This incident still says a lot today about the need for reform in the profession.
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Some cities just can’t seem to get on top of clearing snow out of the streets—even if it snows every. single. year. Why?
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Is the engineering profession institutionally and intellectually prepared for a world in which we recognize that we need to slow down cars on urban streets? Revisiting one of our best podcast episodes of all time, in which Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn asks this question.
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Skyler Yost, Ecosystem Builder for the city of York, PA, shares how you can foster entrepreneurship in your community—and create an environment in which entrepreneurs support one another, too.
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Revisiting one of our most popular conversations ever, with well-known blogger and financial self-sufficiency expert Mr. Money Mustache. (Who has been in the news in 2019 for an amusing reason!)
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Once a month we host Ask Strong Towns, a members-only live Q&A webcast. Here’s the video and audio from this month’s.
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Ryan Short—CEO of CivicBrand—shares how you can find your community’s true essence, including how to engage with your community to ensure the creation of your brand is a grassroots effort, how to ensure your brand actually aligns with what your community offers, and how finding your community’s true essence makes your city or town stronger.
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Speed enforcement won’t fix what’s actually a street design problem. And the way we use speed enforcement as a tool to accomplish other goals unrelated to speeding ends up not making anyone safer.
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You probably use Zillow to shop fantasy mansions in cities you could never afford. But would you sell them your house?
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Strong Towns’s own Kea Wilson discusses what her time as a bookseller at Left Bank Books in St. Louis taught her about making local businesses a third place, including what building a third place actually looks like, how third places are more economically resilient, and how you can make your local business a third place.
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Revisiting a 2017 conversation between Charles Marohn and Chris Arnade about the toll of economic and social disintegration in American communities.
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Your daily commute sucks. Is it also making you go broke?
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Dustin Ratcliff—founding member of Walk2Connect—about how you can connect with your community on foot, including how to motivate your neighbors to form a walking group, how to use your walking group to influence how your city or town is develop, and how connecting with your community on foot makes our cities and towns stronger.
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Building an accessory apartment is one of the gentlest ways you can increase the housing stock in your town. But does that mean that states should be the ones making the rules about how you can do it—even if those rules are permissive?
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Jordan Katcher—Community Development Specialist for the State of Utah, focusing on rural communities—about how government employees can break down silos in rural communities, including how to choose who to get involved in the process, how to understand the needs of rural communities, and most important, how breaking down silos can make rural communities stronger.