Chuck Marohn 0:00

Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. Last week, I did a briefing. First of all, let's just say this is our member drive week, which is always a ton of fun. You're gonna get a lot of content this week, podcast listeners. Last week, I did a briefing for a bunch of people that we invited. We tried something different. I think it turned out really well, and as I'm doing this video presentation, I realize I want to share this with the podcast listeners.

So what you are going to get is the audio from a video that is now available on YouTube as well. We'll put the link in the show notes to that. You're getting the audio now today of that presentation, and then at the end there's a Q and A. So half of this is me talking, doing a presentation, talking about Strong Towns strategy, and the other half is Q and A. If you want to just skip to the second half, because the Q and A is, I thought, really good, you can do that. If you want to watch the whole thing, go to YouTube.

Of course, along with everything else we're doing this week, I'm going to ask you, if you're not a member, go sign up and be one. Strongtowns.org/membership. You're going to get our special member music today on the way out as a little reminder. So thanks everybody. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Here's the presentation.

Rachel Quednau 1:16

Our plan for today, Chuck is going to share. He's got presentations prepared to talk about Strong Towns strategy, and then we will have ample time for Q and A. So as Chuck's talking, feel free to put your questions in the Q and A or in the chat. Yeah, we have kind of a culture at Strong Towns of saying hey in the chat and telling where you're coming from if you feel like doing that. I'm Rachel. I am the director of movement building at Strong Towns. I'm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and this is Chuck Marohn. He is our founder and president, and he's in Brainerd, Minnesota.

Chuck Marohn 1:53

That's right. Thank you, Rachel. This is something that we wanted to do. I'll let everybody know kind of insider why we're all here. We have a huge email list, tens of thousands of people, and on that email list there are people who sometimes drop down the engagement scale. Don't open our emails as much, don't participate as much. I don't know if you know this, Rachel, but my wife this weekend said, hey, I got this invite to this thing you're doing tomorrow. I'm thinking, yeah, that's because you don't open our emails very often. She's thinking, oh no, I don't.

So a lot of the people who are very engaged get this stuff regularly. But there's a group of you who maybe have not kept up, but maybe not been insidery. We wanted to just pause and invite a session for just you so we can talk kind of inside our strategy and what we're doing and what we're working on here at Strong Towns. So this is a presentation I have given once before to a group of inside people who are really interested in our strategy, and I want to do that with you here again, all of you today.

So this is me and a small portion of our team in Pensacola, where we did a conference. We put on a conference with the Tudor Community Institute back in September, and it was really, really amazing. So this is me and Stella in 2008. Stella is my youngest daughter, and she is a recurring character in this presentation, so you can take note of her here.

I say this, I went back and got this photo because November of 2008 is when I started writing a blog. The blog that became known as Strong Towns began this year, right after the election, right after all the craziness of 2008. If you've heard me talk about this before, I said, writing is very therapeutic, and at this point in my life, I thought, either I'm crazy or the world is crazy, and I'm open to either. So I'm going to sit down and write out my thoughts and just see where this takes me.

So this is Stella and I in 2008. That blog quickly became a site and a nonprofit. This is from the left to the right, John Commerce, Ben Olson in the middle and myself on the right. We're the three who started Strong Towns back in 2009, is when we filed the official paperwork. Originally, this whole thing was a blog in support of the three of our consulting practices. We were all working together. John had his own firm. Ben and I were working together for an organization called Community Growth Institute, and this was to support the work that we were doing.

Our emphasis at the time was working across both geographic and political difference. John is part of our Democrat Farm Labor Party. He works down in the Twin Cities. Ben is more of a suburban guy. He actually had his dad who was running on the Independence Party ticket, and back in 2008 I was caucusing with the Republican Party, the Independent Republican Party, here in Minnesota, and was living in a small town, so we kind of covered the state, and we were trying to do something radical, which is, let's talk about the way our cities grow, the way we build them. Let's try to cross these differences, and let's focus really, primarily on helping other professionals with their insights and doing things differently.

It didn't take long before I was getting invited to speak in places. I had been traveling around Minnesota, giving this talk that was called the Curbside Chat. Still do that talk today, although we call it Strong Towns 101, but in the early days, it was called the Curbside Chat. This is my trip to Bismarck. It was my first out of state trip. They promised me an audience of over 20, the two organizers on each side of me, and then they had one person in attendance. But it was great, because I got to go to a different state and share these ideas.

Ultimately, in 2012 I got invited to a couple places in California and wound up making a statewide tour out of it. I did not, in my naivete, understand how big California was, so I started in Redding, and six days later, ended up in San Diego and spoke to audiences all throughout the state. It was incredible, and it was very affirming. It was this thing that said, Chuck, you're on the right track. Strong Towns has some really good ideas. Keep talking. Keep spreading this message. Keep sharing this.

The early days of Strong Towns were about figuring out the core of the message. I would say, if you go back and read those early things, there's a lot of frustration that's expressed. There's a lot of kind of bewilderment, not a lot of answers, but that would come very soon. Here's a sense of what we did in the early years. Particularly in those years, Twitter and Facebook were huge for us in terms of reaching people. We figured out early on how to do paid advertising too, and we were able to kind of accelerate our reach and the number of people who were connected to us on those platforms. We had just tremendous amounts of growth.

In 2014 we had a changeover in our board. I started out as a statewide organization or a Minnesota focused organization, and all of a sudden found myself, or ourselves as a group with people plugging in all over the country. As part of that shift we had, our Minnesota-based board kind of fade away and bring in a new set of people who were focused more nationally.

This is again Stella in 2015, so you can see the change very dramatic in her. This is our first strategic plan, and we put together right after that board shift. We met in December in New York City, and then everybody came up here to Minnesota in 2015 and we put together our very first strategic plan. So up to this point, it had been me and some friends and some volunteers and some other people doing some stuff, and all of a sudden, now we became more strategic about what we were doing.

What you see this exercise here? That's John Reuter in the red in the middle there, looking at his phone, is Andrew Burleson. They're also on the board today. They continue to be board members 11 years later. As we were looking at what are the things we do well, what are the things that are most impactful, ultimately, out of this, we came up with our first strategic plan.

That first strategic plan called on us to do three things. There were the three things that we were good at, at least two of them. Create powerful content. So how do we continue to take the content that we're doing on a blog and expand that ultimately into an entire media site and media organization. The second was, share our content widely. Share this message widely. How do we take and become really, really good at things that an engineer and a planner aren't necessarily good at? How do we get our stuff out on social media? How do we position our stuff? How do we use our email system well? How do we use these tools of digital communication to get our stuff out into the world and grow a movement.

Then the third thing, and I got to say, we didn't really have any ideas on how we were going to do this, but we wanted to try to figure it out, is to nudge people to take action. With these two things, could we do this in a way where at the end of the day, people went out and did positive things that were aligned with our mission and our overall objectives.

I showed you the social media followers earlier. Here's what happened subsequent to the adoption of our strategic plan. We had a tremendous amount of growth. We started to reach a lot of people and the intention on content and distribution, as opposed to—and I'll say, we turned down some, I mean, for us, was a huge grant in 2014. We kind of shifted away from doing some of the stuff that was more consultant-like, more local, to focus on this larger national media approach really, really paid off in terms of the overall objective of building a movement.

In fact, yeah, just to give you some context for how much this growth was, in 2015 our site traffic. So the total number of unique people in a year that would visit our site was 70,000. Some of them would come once. Some of them would come multiple times. Some of them come every day. But the total number of uniques was 70,000. By 2021 that was over 2 million. So that's a tremendous amount of change in our reach, really directly attributable to the strategies we adopted in 2015 to grow movement.

Here was a problem. Our strategic plan was to create content, to distribute that message broadly, and then to nudge people to take action. The question we started to ask ourselves as this movement was growing is, where are the results? Where's the action? Where's the people we were supposed to inspire? So in 2021, and again, this is Stella in 2021, we embarked on a process to update our strategic plan. We're thinking, all right, that got us so far. We did really well with that. Now we've got to rethink. We're a different organization. We're a different movement. We actually have millions of people now reading us regularly. What do we do differently?

So you see this shift in objective. In 2015 we recognize that we'd assembled some compelling ideas. In 2022 we had turned those ideas into a movement. We recognized that now we have a movement of people out ready to do stuff. In 2015 we said, if we're going to have any influence, we need to grow movement. By 2022 we said, we've got that, but we also need to now talk about how we do substantive policy change. How does this movement of people that we've grown result in change?

In 2015, our primary strategies were on growing a movement. By the time we get to 2022, we're doing some movement building, but we're also talking about, how do we leverage for policy reforms? Where do we push on this thing we're fighting to get the most change the quickest? Where can we actually find what we talked about was, what's the Zen point of change that we can come up with?

So our programs changed. Our program shifted. Instead of creating content, and that being it, we said, all right, we're going to create content, but it's going to be a specific kind of content. We're going to inform and inspire this movement that we've built. That's where we're going to focus on energy, not necessarily on reaching orders of new people, but really, really grow in this group that we've reached. We're going to share a message widely. Yeah, what we really want to do is expand the movement size and influence. We want to help the people who are carrying the Strong Towns message forward become more influential in the places that they're in.

Then, instead of nudging people to take action, we said we have to have an active strategy of mobilizing these people, this group of people that have signed up for Strong Towns, mobilizing them to actually accomplish something. We had a program that we had been, and I'll say messing around with beginning in 2018. Part of nudging people to take action is that we did see things happening. One of the things that was happening was that groups were coming together at the local level, calling themselves Strong Towns, and then going out and doing whatever. Sometimes that whatever was just sharing articles on Facebook, sometimes it was actually going out and doing really substantive things.

So in 2018 we said, let's figure out what's going on. Let's track these groups. Let's try to understand whether they're effective, where they need help, where they need support. What we could do that would help them, but the beginning was just trying to understand them, who they were, what they were doing, because we did not lead this effort. This just kind of happened organically as a result of the things we were doing.

But in 2021 we actually sat down with that strategic plan and said, all right, let's get very intentional about the local conversations program. Here's what's happened subsequent. Today, we have over 300 local conversations, not just across North America, which is really kind of crazy to see the number of places that have signed up for an official and gone through our onboarding process and become a real local conversation. But we have them in New Zealand, in Uganda, and we have other ones starting literally all over the world in a way that is really inspiring and amazing to us.

I put this one in. I could have put 100 of these in, but this is one of the more recent ones that crossed my desk. The Buffalo local conversation out putting in benches, getting on the news, doing things that are really impressive and inspiring. We see a constant, steady feed of these groups out doing stuff that is really cool.

So now we are at the end of 2025 and again, this is Stella. I'm taking a snapshot of her here because she started college in August, and I wanted her as a recurring character in this presentation, because in the time that we've been working on this project, I have literally raised an adult. It's a long time to be at something. She's now at the University of Arizona. I'm really, really proud of her, looking forward to her coming back home later this month for Thanksgiving.

But when we pause and look at things in 2025 we notice some stuff that is different. Our site traffic is declining. We could go into the myriad of reasons. I have a wife that works in media, their site traffic is declining. We watch and study reports from other outlets. Site traffic is declining, kind of across the board, as social media has become less of a feeder for places. Places that relied on that traffic have seen a decline, but with that decline, we've also seen kind of a broader diversification of our audience as well. We have more people coming to our site with intention, not casually, in the way they did in the past.

So one of the trends that we've seen is our membership continues to climb. Our membership continues to grow and grow at steady rates. This is just the last few years. Here's kind of over a broader trend since that first strategic plan in 2015. We're now up to 6,500 current members, which means 6,500 people who have donated to Strong Towns at one point or another in the last 12 months.

If we look at just this year compared to last year, last year's in orange here, you can see that by the end of September, we were plus 140 in terms of new members with old members kind of dropping off, or members not renewing and dropping away. This year at the same point in time, we're plus 773. Plus 773. So even though our site traffic has gone down and been on a decline, what we're seeing is robust engagement and lots and lots of people coming to the table.

Here's a takeaway that we have today, and the thing that we are—I was going to say, struggling with, but I think have come to a recognition of—we've demonstrated that our movement can grow even when our web traffic doesn't. For someone who is here at the very beginning, where web traffic equaled growth in the movement, this has been a really radical shift to get our minds around that we can reach new people, see success and that it doesn't necessarily show up in hits on our website. Part of that is because we now have an advanced guard in our website. The website is not the first place people end up. It's the second or third place people end up.

Here's our video views over the last few years, you can see a steady, steady increase. 2025 is as of the end of September. We're going to be over 12 million by the end of this year, I think, pretty confidently at that pace. So a doubling this year, after a doubling and a doubling and a doubling and a doubling. So we're seeing steady growth in these places. Same thing on social media platforms. So we are participating in those places, and then people are ending up on our website and ending up as part of our movement through that overall process.

Here's where I want to bring us to, and I'm going to get to questions here in a minute. There's a lot of things that we've done for a long time that at some point we have to let go of. If you were here at the very, very early days, we had this thing called the Strong Towns Network, which was a Ning site, where it was a Facebook for Strong Towns geeks. That went away because it just didn't have the uptake. We had so many other things that were seeing huge momentum that we had to spend time on. There's some irony in that, because we're bringing back something similar next year.

But the point here is that, I said, I've raised an entire adult in this period of time that we've done this, and it's hard to let go. I mean, at the end of the day, it's hard to let go, but sometimes you have to. You have to move on to the next thing. One of the things that we've recognized is that written columns have been the heart of our strategy since the very beginning. Me, writing three days a week was the thing that propelled this movement in its early days. That's no longer the case, and that's okay. We can live with that. It's time for the next phase.

You know, while I love this, and this is a lot of fun, metaphorically, to have little kids at home, I also love being with my wife, and I also love this next phase. For Strong Towns, there's a next phase coming, and we are working on that. When I think about what that's going to look like, and we've been having some internal conversations about this. We certainly have a board and advisory board that we've been talking to. I can't tell you exactly what it will look like, but I can tell you the rough direction that it seems to be going in.

We have successfully built a movement. We have millions of people that are plugging into our stuff every year. We have tens of millions of people who are interacting with us on social media. There are very few people working in public policy around cities, around local growth, around bottom up that have not heard of Strong Towns or interacted with our ideas in some way. I think the cool thing that we see is that our ideas show up in the wild now unattributed to us. So they are so it's part of the ecosystem independent of us, which is actually what success looks like, particularly if you're not trying to get credit for things, but just trying to see change in the world, which is where we're at.

So when I look at what this new version of Strong Towns looks like, we focus on our priority campaigns, but not just on the campaign itself as a content delivery vehicle, but actually see action on those priority campaigns. I haven't mentioned it yet, but in the 2021 plan, we identified five priority campaigns: transparent local accounting, safe streets, ending highway expansions, incremental housing everywhere, and ending parking minimums and mandates. We want to see, and we have seen, but we really want to accelerate action on those campaigns. We need to focus on movement building, and we need to continue to assert thought leadership and be thought leaders in this space. But I think the priority here matters. In subordinate to the other movement building and action things that we're now ready to do.

So in summary, Strong Towns has grown a movement. We're now ready to grow the impact from that movement. That's the big shift. You know, there's a lot of people who have been kind of calling for us to do more here, do more there. We're a nonprofit. We have a certain budget, we have a certain staff size, and so it's always what we say no to has been the most important thing. It allows us to say yes to the right things. Figuring out what that right thing is, and allowing that to evolve and change as we mature is really, really important, particularly as we stay focused on our mission and accomplishing our mission as an organization.

So this is where I've stopped the presentation for the couple places that I've given it here internally. But I did add three questions at the end, because these are the questions that I get kind of the most often when I talk to external groups about our strategy. The first one is, who funds Strong Towns? I'm going to answer these three questions, and then we'll do your question. So if you have a question, there's a Q and A button, you can go in there and type it in. We'll also, I think if the technology works. I think you can raise your hand and we'll probably call on some people, but put your question in the Q and A thing first, and then we'll call on you from there.

Who funds Strong Towns? I think this is a really important question, because for us, it was really important. We talk about cities being influenced by the money streams. We like the big project, because that's where we can get the money. We put every problem we have in terms of transportation, because the transportation budget has more money than the park budget or the homelessness budget, or whatever you want to refer to.

So for us, it was really important to build an organization where the internal incentives were aligned with our mission and what we tried to do. So if you look at our budget year to year, our big line item is membership. By membership, we mean people who give us $5, $10 a month on an ongoing basis. Those recurring memberships are really, really important to us, because they create this stable base. Membership is our number one budget item, and it's the number one thing that fuels the organization.

The second thing then for us would be events. We go out. I showed you that tour of California. We go and do events all the time. We speak at conferences. We go speak in different places to try to help them, kind of move them along. Some of those events we are able to do for free, but generally we're able to do free events because we have a paid event that we're going. I'm going to speak here at a conference. They're charging revenue to bring us there. They pay us. Then we can throw in a side event on the side, here or there. But events winds up to be one of our other big line items.

We have a couple of foundations that have supported us for multiple years at rates that are fairly significant. Then we have some donors who have written us larger checks, kind of consistently over time. These funds create a base of support that everything else sits upon, that everything else tends to be more lumpy. We'll get a donor who gives us a big endowment at one point, but no promise of recurring. We will get a grant at one point, but no subsequent grant. Those are the lumpy things that we try to add on top of this base of support. But the base of support largely comes from small donors. That's the biggest one. Events, and then, literally, two foundations and a handful of donors that support that base.

Let me do the second question here, Rachel, and then I'll do the third, and then we'll go to the Q and A. This is one I get a lot. Why doesn't Strong Towns start a 501(c)(4) and get involved in electoral politics? I think that there are two major reasons, and maybe I'll talk about them separately. The first one really goes back to this funding thing. There's a lot of money in electoral politics, and if we were interested in just blowing up our budget, we could do this and do this really well and get a lot of money in. We have seen other nonprofits do this. We've seen other people go down this route, and you wind up in a situation where the tail wags a dog.

We are extremely mission focused. We are really trying to change the way our cities build, are designed, are maintained, are sustained, the way they budget, the way they grow, the way they invest. We are really trying to make our cities financially strong and resilient, better places to live. What we don't want to do is have a bunch of money come in from this part of politics, and then all of a sudden we have all this pressure to, in a sense, change and conform our message and change and conform our approach to something that a political party is doing that does not align with what we do. We want to stay independent, and so while we recognize that that could be very lucrative, it's intentionally not what we've set out to do.

The second thing, though, and I think this is equally important, maybe more so, is that while we certainly see a lot of public policy implications for Strong Towns, we don't see them transfer well into the realm of politics. We tell our local conversations you can't endorse candidates because you have to be able to work with everybody. If you are endorsing this person and their opponent wins, we want you to be able to go to their opponent because their opponent needs to be able to see why a Strong Towns approach is really important for their community.

So we want to be able to work with everyone. We think we have ideas that everyone can relate to, that really are universal, that are not partisan. Going to mobilize one side at the expense of the other—and so we want to continue to position ourselves and our movement as being for everybody. Because of that, we've intentionally not gone into the 501(c)(4) or any type of political realm.

Let me do the third question, and then we'll get to your questions. What does success look like for the Strong Towns movement? I would say success for us right now—in 2015 success looked like reaching more people and building a movement. In 2021 success looked like creating a structure where we could start to see policy change on the ground. Success in 2025, 2026 is going to look like actually seeing those things happen, seeing cities adopt a crash analysis studio, seeing cities adopt our housing ready city platform, and changing their codes, changing their ecosystem around development, adopting some of these financial tools that we've come up with for them to use to get more housing built. It looks like cities removing bad transportation projects from their transportation plan and really focusing on things that are high returning. It looks like cities using the finance decoder to really understand their budget trends and make changes so that their cities don't become financially weaker. It looks like outcomes. That's what success looks like today, and that's what we are kind of trying to pivot and shift to position ourselves to be able to do really well. Rachel, that's 29 minutes of Chuck talking. We're probably done with that.

Rachel Quednau 27:41

Yes. So someone asked, do any of our focus areas, those five core campaigns, get more interest than others?

Chuck Marohn 27:51

I would say yes. How would you answer that?

Rachel Quednau 27:53

Well, I think our campaign for safe streets and our campaign for incremental housing and sort of our campaign for ending parking minimums, I would say the ones that end up getting talked about the most. We get asked about them. We see people on the ground doing things around them because they're really tangible, and in some ways, feel like you have more of a chance of making an impact on them. Say, ending highway expansion and transparent local accounting are just harder to tap into because they involve more layers of bureaucracy and much longer tail to see real change. Do you think that's accurate?

Chuck Marohn 28:31

Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think one of our challenges is to make those latter two more accessible to people. I mean, we had a meeting this morning where we talked about the ending highway expansions. We have some things planned for 2026 that are based around the Highway Trust Fund expiring in September, and there really not being a viable political way for that to be extended. We're trying to make that into a campaign where we can help kind of localize some of those transportation issues. But, yeah, I feel like that's our challenge. We picked these five campaigns because we felt like if we make progress on them, it carries a whole bunch of other stuff with it that we also care about. But these are the five we can really, really move on. So yeah, I think you're right. Those are the three that we see the most action on, and the other two are ones that we're working on.

Rachel Quednau 29:23

Okay, another question. How do you envision Strong Towns as an effective mediator between city and real estate developers, especially trying to open the door for business developers can bring their ideas to fruition in a win-win manner?

Chuck Marohn 29:36

It's a really good question. I'm kind of hung up on the word mediator, because a mediator, I may be thinking someone's sitting in a room bridging gaps. I mean, you've got a degree in conflict resolution. This is elbow to elbow really difficult work to do, and I don't know as we could scale that in a way that would be as personal. Now, can we help our local conversations be that difference maker? Sure, to a degree.

I think the thing for us that we have been focused on is not trying to solve every housing related problem, but trying to solve the one that we think is solvable at the local level. In other words, there's no real obstacle for cities to do this beyond will. So if you look at our housing ready toolkits, and we've got two of the three already published. If you go to strongtowns.org/housing, in the first one, we just lay out six things that cities can do to make their ordinances function better. In the second one, we talk about building an ecosystem of incremental developers and builders to be able to do that work. The third one that's going to come out early next year, we're going to talk about, how do you actually pump money into that in a way that is financially sustainable for the city so we don't lose money or take a lot of risk doing it.

As part of that dialogue, developers are part of the solution, and they have to be. I mean, if we want stuff built, developers have to be part of that conversation. Now, do we fix everything? No. I mean, when we released the first one, there was a whole chorus of people saying, you're not talking about building codes. It's no, we're not. Then the other one—well, you're not talking about—no, no, we're talking about these things, because cities can directly, today affect these things, and if they do, it will have a meaningful impact, and it will actually pave the way for other conversations. I think that's how I would think about the mediation between cities and developers. We've got to get bottom up developers building bottom up stuff in a way that the city celebrates, and I think that will create or exercise muscles that will really be beneficial to everyone.

Rachel Quednau 31:50

Kind of on a related note, someone's asking about, they tried to engage with Strong Towns to get help on a zoning case. I don't know the history here, but we as a national organization don't typically engage in super local issues. As a national organization, we can talk more about local conversations. We have mentioned that program throughout this webinar, and we can talk more about it, but that's really the vehicle that we encourage people to use to make local change is get together with other Strong Towns advocates in your community and do this yourself. We're not doing that from as a national organization. Can you talk about that decision, Chuck?

Chuck Marohn 32:33

I remember back in 2013, 2014, I got invited to go to Idaho to do some on the ground work. By on the ground work, I mean, let's just call it consulting. I'm there on the ground. I'm helping them figure this out. I'm walking through stuff. I'm preparing. The grant that I mentioned earlier, that we turned down, would have had me write a zoning code and help them with a comprehensive plan and doing all this stuff hyper, hyper local. When I did that, I was gone for a week, and I had a bunch of prep work ahead of time, and then a bunch of stuff afterward. I didn't write any articles for the site, I didn't post anything on social media. I didn't send out any emails.

What we saw immediately was that all the work that I've been doing kind of fell back. We were growing the audience, we were meeting people, we were growing our email audience, we were building that movement. Then all of a sudden all the movement building stopped. That was a turning point for me, in combination with a bunch of other things at the time to say, okay, I default to saying yes. I default to wanting to help everybody that walks in the door. I default to wanting to, where I'm called, go. But I had to recognize, back in 2013, 2014, that there was a cost to doing that. If I was going to go to Idaho and spend three weeks, before and during and after, then I wasn't going to do these other things that were going to grow the overall movement. I had to make a decision on what one actually created the greatest amount of good, what helped us get closer to our mission.

I have to tell everybody listening, the biggest Catholic guilt thing that I live with regarding Strong Towns is the number of people who write me every day, who say, Chuck, I love what you do. Everything Strong Towns is so inspiring. Let me tell you about my situation. Then you get eight paragraphs of them explaining some deeply personal, deeply complex thing that's going on in their community, and then there's a paragraph at the end, as a call for help. I don't have the capacity to even read those, let alone respond to them.

Part of the way that I sleep at night, because I get so much of those, and we as an organization get so much of those, is to try to find really ways to help people in that situation. Local conversations is one way. In the membership side, when people become a member, we have a recurring Strong Towns Anything. Come to an open thing. I do those frequently where it's just, come in, ask your question, I'll talk to you. I'll work through it. But it's a defined period of time. We've created some forums where people can ask those questions and essentially get crowdsourced answers by people who care about similar stuff or have seen similar things.

We are—Rachel and I won't make any announcements here today, because we're still working on timelines, but I know we have some things we want to run next year to bring members in more collaboration with each other. When people say, I emailed you, the first response that I always have is, I'm so sorry. Did I get back to you? I'm so sorry. I try. We have to make decisions about how we go about making change. The reality is, is that if we can change 1,000 people's thoughts or the culture around building and development, we are going to give tailwinds to people doing really good work, way, way, way more than if we spent our time and resources in one specific place. That's an intentional trade off. I apologize to people, because I would love to be a million Chucks who could be in a million places, but we just have had to make some strategic decisions. Does that sound—is that? I mean, you're here, you see that, right?

Rachel Quednau 35:51

Yep, I agree. It's really hard. It is the most painful thing. Because let me give you another example, kids who are killed on roadways, kids who are killed on streets. I have written about children being killed in auto crashes. I've written a number of articles that have gotten super high traffic, and people find them really kind of—

Chuck Marohn 36:19

Yeah. The whole book started around one, right?

Rachel Quednau 36:22

Exactly. Confessions. Thank you, Rachel. If we wanted to write that article, the tragedy is, is we could write it every single day, and we have people all the time who get a hold of us. It's this child I cared for, this person, family friend of mine, this street, and they want our help. I, trust me, I want to do it. I really, really, really want to do it. I could write that story every day. There's so much pain around that issue that we could write that story every day and not exhaust the pain.

Rachel Quednau 37:34

Yeah, which is why we're trying to create tools and resources for people, yeah, streets where they live. Yeah, we had a question. As you move towards impact, what are the obstacles you envision, and what are your ideas to overcome those obstacles? The big question, but if we're making this shift, what do you see as the biggest obstacles?

Chuck Marohn 37:55

Here, the biggest obstacles? How would you answer that one? There's a ton of things we're trying to overcome, right?

Rachel Quednau 38:03

But our polarized country would be one of them. I mean, you have this backdrop of, yeah, polarization, insanity, really, in some ways, that is really hard.

Chuck Marohn 38:17

Yeah, I think also continuing to—this whole conversation we've literally just been having, but continuing to discern where do we get more involved on the ground. For instance, with our local conversations, we really want to help them be more strategic and take action around our five campaigns, but at the same time, we're not going to be sending a staff member into every group in every city. We can't do that, and that's not sustainable, so we'll have to make decisions. We are making decisions about how involved we be, and how involved do we let—how much do we just let our local groups lead and do their thing and come—

Chuck Marohn 38:58

Trust? Yeah, there's this dance between local autonomy and—I watch a group we have in Portland, they message very differently than a group we have in Tulsa. They just talk about all this stuff very differently because they're different places. How do you respect that difference, while understanding that what they do in Tulsa reflects on what they do in Portland and what they do in Portland reflects on what they do in Tulsa. So there's a line there that we try to navigate where we try to coach people on staying on the right side of the line, so that we all are lifting each other up.

It's hard when you communicate through social media, which is a lot of what we do is we reach people where they are on social media, and we try to bring them into our conversation. Part of it is that when you're in the—I'm going to say this, and maybe this is the wrong way. You can Rachel often corrects me when I get out of line. So say this in a better way than me, but part of when you're in the sewer and we pull someone out, you have a little bit of sewage on you. People still default to, I think the things we see work on social media, which is the demonization and the anger and the polarization. So a lot of what we coach people in is, here's how we're going to make change, and it's not with those tools that feel like you're getting traction, but you're actually falling behind on your objective. I think we have that as the backdrop to our culture. So it's hard to navigate that.

It's hard to find—I mean, I've written about this, and we've talked about this a lot. We show you impressive growth numbers in our readership and our YouTube views and all that. We could triple that easily overnight, if we just went polarizing. If we just leaned into demonizing people and being polarizing and all that, I think we would wreck what we have built. But we could do if that was our goal, we could do that. I think there's this dance between pulling people out of that and then helping them—what I would say is be the better version of themselves, and then not using that tool to reach people. Would you say that differently?

Rachel Quednau 41:18

No, I think that's fair. Okay, all right, this person is anonymous. I'm gonna take your question in good faith. What's your response to a criticism that Strong Towns is a self-fulfilling echo chamber? What do you think? I haven't actually heard that criticism a lot, but clearly this—

Chuck Marohn 41:36

I haven't heard it for a long time. I mean, obviously any group of people that kind of meets the way we do, talks the way we do, you do become, in a sense, insulated. I think that Strong Towns has, to our detriment—but I feel like it's maybe even a little bit—there's always this fine line that I have in my brain of what is good for Chuck and what is good for the movement, because what I like is to engage in ideas. I love mixing it up. I love being challenged. I love the stuff. Sometimes that's not good for us as a movement.

So there's this, I think, what was acceptable discourse in 2012, 2013 when we were trying to figure things out and really push the boundaries, is a little bit different than it is in 2025. That might come across as a little echo chamberly, because I think we probably have—well, we have more diversity within our movement. When you measure diversity in terms of humans and their geographies and their passions and their backgrounds and their ethnicities and religions and all the things that we generally measure diversity on, we probably do have less diversity of thought as our ideas have matured and then been tied to, here's this problem we identified, here's the set of strategies we have towards dealing with it.

I do think that for people who were here in 2012, 2013, they're thinking, well, Strong Towns is not this font of new ideas. Part of it is because we've matured and what we're trying to do. So I do think that for a certain set of people, it's a valid criticism. We have this thing that's been on our strategic plan for years, that we're going to do these issues summits, and we've been able to pull off a couple of them from time to time. But my dream with that is that we would get 25 people in a room who, in a sense, disagreed with my thoughts to one degree or another, and then we would just kind of sit in a room and hash it out and talk about it and debate ideas. That was really fun to me. Our movement doesn't do that as openly as we probably used to, and so yeah, I think that's probably, there's probably some sense of that.

Let me say it this way, we're more disciplined than we were 10 years ago or 12 years ago, and the reason is because it's more than just me now, and when I talk, I don't represent just me and my thoughts as they come out of Strong Towns. I now, as the president of this organization, represent not just me, but 6,500 members who are very, very different from each other. I represent 304 local conversations, which are very different geographies with very different things. So, yeah, I think when you look at it, it probably feels a little more echo chamberly, because it is less chaotic than it used to be. Would you add any of that? Or do you think I'm missing something?

Rachel Quednau 44:54

No, that's fair. That's fair. I would just encourage everyone, if you have the opportunity, if you can show up at any Strong Towns event, whether it's a local conversation in your area, it's our colleague, Norm speaking or Ed or Chuck speaking in your area, or ideally, amazingly, coming to our national gathering, you will see such a huge variety of people doing so many different things with so many different perspectives that I would hope that would push back a little bit on the idea that it's an echo chamber.

Chuck Marohn 45:27

But I think the crazy thing for me is that for people finding Strong Towns today, I'm not the most important voice. For people who don't know Strong Towns, who are coming to Strong Towns for the first time they may engage with us for a long period of time before they hear even my name or anything that I did, which is really cool to me. It's cool. Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Quednau 45:55

Let's see, question about how can Strong Towns build tools and communication to win over NIMBYs to make things like zoning change and parking reforms and incremental development more possible?

Chuck Marohn 46:07

I think you have to have three thoughts when it comes to NIMBYs. First, the current system is falling apart. It's not working. It's not working anywhere, and everybody can kind of see it. So the first thing that we do to win over NIMBYs is actually give a story, a coherent story about what's going on that they can relate to. You can look at different urbanist organizations, and to me, between the jargon and the political polarization and the priors that they bring, it's really hard to reach people who are not being reached. We have to reach them with a story that explains the decline that they see around them in a way that they can understand.

I think the second thing is just to not demonize them, to respect the fact that a lot of the things that they're feeling and a lot of the reactions they have are actually rational. I watch my city decline, or I watch things not work the way they used to, or I watch things—I'm paying higher taxes, and my services are going down, and the city is doing this big, huge project out on the edge, but no one's fixing my sidewalk. Oh, the answer to this is a big apartment building in my neighborhood? No, thank you. There's a lot of incoherence coming out of city halls today, and I don't think we should be surprised that people react poorly to it. I think we should be empathetic with that.

The third thing is, then, I think we need to scale our responses to things that are not going to—we talk about it here internally—raise the elephant, get the elephant charging. That's a reference to a book called Switch, How to Make Change When Change is Hard, but we try not to get that person motivated to come out and fight against us. So a lot of when we talk about incremental development is because we believe that that's an important muscle for cities to have, but also just as a strategy. If we're building backyard cottages and homes in between other homes, and turning single family homes into duplexes, yeah, people might show up and be opposed to that, but it's a way different level of emotion and anger and motivation than if you're tearing down a block of single family homes across the house from me and putting a six story apartment unit. It just is. So I think part of it is that scaling it to meet not just good development patterns that actually build strength, but ones that actually also build the culture of change along with them. That's a muscle we need to get better at exercising.

Rachel Quednau 48:43

Let's take this question. I'm just going to summarize. So someone is in a community where city councilors are having a conversation about zoning codes. They want to make change, but they're not actually making the change. How do I approach this? This person also says that they've run for office, and friends have run for office, and they're losing. What would you say to keep us motivated?

Chuck Marohn 49:08

Wow, okay, part of motivation is having success. So what I hear from this question is, I'm doing things that I'm not having success. How do I not give up? I don't know your situation. I don't know it deeply, but I do know a lot of people in the situation, and what I generally tell them is that you're missing something. You're either missing other people to help you and support you. In other words, when we go through our local conversation program, the first step we do is called How to Gather, and we teach people how to bring more people into your local conversation. So you actually have more than just you and a handful of people. You have a crowd of people working on this.

The second step is learning to communicate. We actually try to train people on here's how you talk about these things in a way that will not motivate someone's elephant to go charging, but will actually get people on your side and help them understand the problem, help them be amenable to your set of solutions. Then the third step is, we teach people how to advocate. We teach them how to think strategically about change.

Generally, when people say, I'm frustrated, I'm getting burned out, is they don't have a group of people helping them. They're not reaching more people and talking about it, and they're not thinking strategically. They're trying to take too big of a bite at the apple. Instead of saying, okay, here's the change we're trying to see. What are the things that need to happen upstream in order to make that change inevitable? So, yeah, I think there's a lot of good people wasting a lot of energy on things that are probably not generating momentum. To me, I would say, let's step back and let's figure out, how do we generate that momentum so we get to where we want to go, and we don't get burned out.

Rachel Quednau 50:52

We do love to hear about folks running for office and winning, and there are so many in Strong Towns community. But also there's other ways, many, many other ways to make change than being an elected official, too.

Chuck Marohn 51:05

So, yeah, I feel like it's a culmination of things. We never say, hey, the way we solve this is to have people run for office, or have people be on plan commissions. I think both of those things are great. Do that, but do that as a culmination of other successful things that are going on. If you just run for office, and then I'm gonna vote for this, you're gonna—if you're one of five votes, you'll lose every time, and then you'll lose the next election. Then what did you gain? Yeah, yeah. Let's build something.

Rachel Quednau 51:38

Let's see if we can take one or two more. From a municipal finance standpoint, have we faced any pushback for not having a formal finance background? Have we considered bringing someone with a dedicated finance background into the movement or leadership? Do we already have someone in that role? I think probably this person is especially talking about the finance decoder and stuff we comment on.

Chuck Marohn 51:58

That's really interesting. Strategically, we recognize this as a shortcoming that we don't have a finance official. If you go back to our programming around when we released the decoder, we interviewed—when we put it together, we had accountants and finance people in the room with us. If you listen to our early content around this, we brought in Shane from GFOA and other people who are really deep into this. Haven't really gotten that criticism, and I think part of it is because we deal with so much math. I mean, I don't know, no one ever comes after me for not understanding numbers.

But the other thing, and this is why we put the decoder together this way, is that it doesn't rely on us doing any calculations. It just relies on us grabbing numbers from existing reports that cities put together and then either dividing one by the other, which is simple to do, or just printing the number. So the finance decoder really has no—it is math that, literally, a third grader could do, taking numbers that the city provides and the city put together and just presenting them in a way that illuminates what's going on.

Every year the city puts together a financial report. That financial report is a snapshot. Here's what our remaining life on our infrastructure is, here's what our net financial position is, here's what our liabilities and assets are. They just put together a report and it's got all this stuff buried in it. All the financial decoder does is take those numbers from that report and put them together with numbers from the similar reports going back decades, and then plots them up on a chart. Here's how your net financial position has gone. Here's how your assets liabilities have gone. Here's where this trend is over time. So I don't want to say a third grader could do it, but a third grader could do the math that we're doing here. So we've never really gotten pushback.

The pushback I've gotten is that it oversimplifies. In other words, you don't know what you're talking about. That kind of, well, our situation is more complicated than what your chart shows. I'm thinking, okay, well, let's have that. I mean, if you think of your own family balance sheet, you can always say, well, yeah, back in 2015 someone lost their job, and then 2021 someone started college, and you know, will show up as different things. Yeah, there's always a complicated story behind it. I feel like when people have brought that up saying, oh, it's so complicated, what they're really saying is that I don't want to talk about this trend, or I don't want to talk about the direction this is going, or I don't want to talk about this overall thing that you're showing because—the finance decoder does not get into the why or the how, or the whole narrative story of a place, it just gets into the trend.

I feel like that's important, because every year I watch my city, I watch cities across the country be able to justify short term budget decisions for expediency. We've got this big problem in front of us. Yep, absolutely. Every year they justify it. When you look at it over time, you see the trend, and that's what we're trying to show with the finance decoder.

Rachel Quednau 55:26

All right, let's go out on this in our last 60 seconds. What tips do you have for a newly elected city councilor? Congratulations, if this is you.

Chuck Marohn 55:38

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the best set of tips ever came from John Reuter, one of our board members, the guy who was in red in the sticker chart thing on the wall, or the post-it notes on the wall earlier. John got elected to the Sandpoint city council, and he said he sat down and he wrote on note cards all the things that he wanted to accomplish. He said when he got done, he had three dozen different note cards, and he didn't go in at the first meeting and be thinking, all right, here's my number one priority. Make it your priority. What he did is he sat back and he listened, and he allowed things to evolve.

As things would come up at the meeting, he knew what his 36 note cards were. When something come up that related to one of his note cards, he would be thinking, I care about this. Tell me more. Let's talk about it. He used everybody else's things as a vehicle to talk about the things that he thought were important and move his issues forward. He only ran for one term because at the end of one term, he had accomplished everything on his note cards and said, I don't need to run again. I feel like having the humility to go in and be thinking, all right, I know what I want to get done, but I also recognize that there's everybody else here who's got similar things. Let me try to make the thing I want to get done the thing they want to get done, not by imposing that, but by understanding, being empathetic to their pain, and fitting my thing into that.

Rachel Quednau 56:59

I had not heard that story before.

Chuck Marohn 57:03

He did a local conversation session a few years ago where that was his thing.

Rachel Quednau 57:09

Probably just forgot it. We're at the end of our time. Thank you everyone so much for sitting as part of this conversation and engaging in it. Chuck any parting words?

Chuck Marohn 57:23

No, just thank you. Everybody who is invited to this today is not a member of Strong Towns. So if this is something that interests you, it is our member drive week next week, Rachel, and so we're going to be reaching out to people, asking them to become members, asking them to support the movement. The biggest thing that gives us confidence to go forward when that lumpy money comes in is that base of support. So thank you to all of you that have been members in the past, and thank you to all of you who are here and interested in us. If this is something that you are motivated to support, strongtowns.org/membership is where you sign up, and we'd love, love, love to have you become a member.

Rachel Quednau 58:03

Thank you all so much. Take care.