The Bottom-Up Revolution
In this special episode, Norm introduces Mary Kate Norton, Strong Towns' new Mobilization Coordinator and Trainer. Mary Kate shares about her background in grassroots organizing, leadership development, and coalition building. She also offers some tips for people hoping to make change in their communities.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hello and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm super excited to be able to regularly profile the people that are doing great work within our community, building connections, establishing opportunities for people to take notice of what's going on in their communities, identify the next smallest thing to address that struggle, and really begin to work through a process of iterating and improving upon the places that we live in.
As part of our Bottom Up Shorts each week, we get to talk with new folks or people that perhaps have taken the opportunity to be published on the Strong Towns website or are leading a local conversation group. In some instances, they've come to work for Strong Towns. So today I'm really excited because we're doing a special episode.
Mary Kate Norton is our new Mobilization and Training Coordinator for our Local Conversations program, helping to establish all of our groups—not just establish them, but deepen the support that we can provide to them, help new leaders that are just early prospects to say, "Hey, this is something that's within reach. This is something that I can totally see happening."
If you ever wonder what exactly is a Local Conversation, it's a group of people that meet together in a place to talk about Strong Towns ideas and to put them into action where they live. We've deliberately left that quite broad and quite open because it really respects and recognizes the organic nature of gatherings of people coming together and being encouraged and spurred on to take action where they live. But at the same time, we also want to provide some support. So one of the things that we always say is your group will form on your timeline with our support.
Mary Kate, you're stepping in to be that key supporter of our Local Conversations program. Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit further?
Sure, sure. My name is Mary Kate. My background is in grassroots community organizing, and so what I'm excited about most about joining the Strong Towns team is getting to work with people in their local communities, but across the continent, as you build the people power and the momentum to transform the communities that we live in.
I love it. As you take on this role—this is a question that we got to ask in the interview process—but what made you interested in coming on board, and what's the thing that most excites you about this new work that you're taking on?
Yeah, I've been a fan of Strong Towns for quite a few years. So I was initially interested in the role because I'm just a fan, and I've admired the work that Strong Towns has done and the resources that Strong Towns puts out into the world.
This role in particular is really exciting to me because I've, in previous roles, been able to see how a group of people in a local place are able to transform things and win more housing for them and their neighbors and to make their streets safer. I'm just so excited to be able to grow into this training position where I get to support people again across the country and the continent as you're transforming your communities. Training is something that I'm just really, really excited about, passionate about, and can't wait to get going on in Local Conversations.
I'll put you on the spot. Is there an instance of a Local Conversation story that's just really stuck with you, some description of what a group has done that has really kind of captured the essence for you of what you see being possible because people are taking action where they live?
I've heard a lot of stories so far. This is just my first week on the job, and I think what's really stuck out to me is just the scale of what people have been able to do—so starting really small, like one block, one curb, one bench by the bus stop, and then how that's able to grow.
I've seen that in different communities that I've been a part of in Lexington, Kentucky, where different coalitions were able to come together and, again, start with just getting cover from the rain on a bus stop. But then, as they've built and grown and brought more people in and gained new perspectives and momentum, they've been able to transform public transportation in their neighborhood or change ordinances around housing.
So I think what I'm most excited about in terms of stories that I've heard so far is just hearing how they've grown from one small block project to something that can become bigger and bigger and bigger.
What stands out to me is that a lot of the challenges that we face in our communities are so large. The predicament is very real. Imagine, you've just found yourself in the midst of a maze or a labyrinth, and then you think, what am I going to do? I don't know how I'm going to get to the end. What am I supposed to do?
Part of the answer is like, take a step and then take another step and just begin that process. The inertial force of all of the weight of the world being on your shoulders means that you need something that just helps you to sort of set that aside. Be like, "Hey, I'll come back to you later, tonight when I go back on the internet to learn about what the world is doing. But for now, I'm going to take a step and really begin to just be bolstered by that experience."
What I think stands out when I chat with Local Conversation leaders is this sense for them that it gave them fresh hope or fresh courage because they didn't have to do it all. There was something in the Strong Towns message that really connected to that, but there was also that recognition—like, I could even do this on my own, but wow, it's better when I do it with others.
Do you want to share just some of the things that you've been able to work at in your life and in your communities where you've lived to be able to get to this point today where you feel a greater degree of confidence in your first week stepping into this and coming alongside so many of our remarkable leaders already?
Yeah, I started working on small projects really 15 years ago now, organizing on my college campus as I was getting small coalitions of students together to get wage increases on college campuses. We got a very small increase in wages, but that made a huge difference for so many people, and that victory really spurred me towards the career that I've had so far in grassroots community organizing.
So bringing people together across political ideologies, across lived experiences and socioeconomic levels and languages even, to make our place better—whether our place is the street that I live on or the whole city—my place, I can make it better, and I can make it better a lot more effectively with all my neighbors.
I've worked as a grassroots community organizer in Lexington, Kentucky, most recently. Through that role, I got to work with so many people from all different walks of life who were committed and passionate to getting more housing in our neighborhoods and not building out down the highway, but infill and building in our communities where people have grown up and raised their kids and want to stay.
So that's the background that I bring to Strong Towns—bringing lots of people together and then training on having that coalition and moving our cities towards what they can be, places that have tree-lined streets and kids out playing and homes for everyone in all different economic levels and stages in their lives, all living together. So I'm really, really excited to bring kind of my background and my excitement to the work at Strong Towns.
Yeah, and there's definitely that sense of—I think there's an emboldening element of saying, is this too much to ask for? Just a good life in a prospering place. And then to seriously grapple—it's not just pie-in-the-sky sort of ideas, but that genuinely, we won't be there tomorrow. We won't be there even in 25 years. There will always be newer challenges to address. But in the meantime, we can, at minimum, begin to improve on these outcomes and begin to see that really shift.
I'd love to hear you describe—one of the things that stood out to me as we went through the interview process, for those that are interested, the Strong Towns hiring process is quite distinct and involves several different layers before we ever got to know, hey, who is this person that is writing these great responses to the prompts in the questionnaires that we were sending out? We met you during the interview process, and I loved your description of the work of creating sort of networks of people who were so dissimilar from each other in other ways. Often the work at the local level is that local allies are unlikely allies.
Can you describe what BUILD Lexington is about and your work with them, and maybe some of the things that you took away from that set of responsibilities that you had?
Absolutely. So the coalition that I've worked with in the past is called BUILD, and it's in Lexington, and it's a multi-faith coalition. So it's, right off the bat, a coalition of people who are doing very different things on Sundays or Friday nights to practice their faith, but all coming together under this common umbrella of "Our city can be better, and our city should be better, and let's work together to make that happen."
So oftentimes in my work with BUILD, we'd be talking about our affordable housing campaign and how are we going to push the city to do more infill, have better homes for especially young families in the city. At that table would be people who are at completely opposite ends of the political spectrum, but who both have grandkids, and their grandkids are in their early 20s, and their grandkids want to stay in the city and have been completely priced out. So they live way out of town, are doing these huge highway commutes, and that's not the vision for what they want their community life to look like.
So despite voting in completely opposite ways, those two people can come together and say, "Hey, my grandkid and your grandkid both need this." Young people too—people kind of all across the political spectrum.
In a transportation campaign that I've worked on, one of the leaders is an elder in the community who has struggled with transportation herself in the past, but for the last 20 years she's had a personal car and has been quite happy with that. She works alongside a leader who has lost her vision and relies entirely on public infrastructure to get around. They have very different stories. Their life circumstances look completely different. They would likely never run into each other anywhere else in the city. But under this umbrella of "Our city can be better, and our city should be better," they've been able to work together and form a relationship, and now are good friends beyond just working together to kind of improve their community.
So it's those sorts of bringing people together that get me really excited and that really drive me in this work with Strong Towns.
I think what I love about that one is that it reflects so many of the different, similar stories that we see for our other Local Conversations. It also acknowledges and helps—I think a lot of our leaders are going to come to you with questions saying, "Hey, there are similar groups in my community that are already doing similar things. How do I work to partner with them?"
I love that you bring that experience to the table to really help with people navigating sometimes the fraught political circumstances in which people might say, "Oh, you're with that group, then I can't be with you," or the opportunity to say, "Hey, if we're doing this with good intent, in good faith, let's find ways to overcome any of these hurdles and find ways to work together."
Maybe, because part of my goal today with this special episode is to introduce you to our broader Local Conversations network, what's a message that you have for our Local Conversation leaders as you step into this role?
I am so excited to meet with you. I'm excited to hear your stories. I can't wait to see what we have in common and what's different about the way that our communities work and the things that need to be changed in our community so that we can live in beautiful places together. I'm excited to hear your stories. I can't wait.
I love it, yeah. And then as a soon-to-be guide for our Local Conversation group leaders, do you have tips or suggestions that you'd like to share just in these early stages?
I think my suggestion and my tip and my starting place is always start with listening and start with stories. So if you're building out a Local Conversation and you're just at the beginning, and it's exciting, and it's also, I'm imagining, quite scary, see whose stories you can hear in your place. Is there a neighbor who you can take out to coffee and just ask, "What's it like to live on our street? What does it feel like for you? What works? What doesn't?"
Hearing those stories, I think, would be my number one advice. Can you tell your story, your personal story, and then can you go out and hear other people's stories? And from there, let's work on some great things together.
I love that because I've been in Toastmasters, where one of the things we learned early on is, even if you need to say, "Hey, for the moment, let's call this person Tom," sharing that personification of a problem is really powerful. The truth is, in our communities, we don't even have to make them up. They exist. They are real. They are the things that we have as touchpoints together, and that really make a difference.
As we wrap, I wanted to ask, what is it that gives you hope in your community?
I think I get a lot of hope from small, small wins. I think seeing one block even just put up a mural, I see as the beginning of this longer trajectory towards safer streets and better homes and a place to live and really growth and prosperity and joy in our communities.
So those small wins, like I mentioned earlier, just having something to keep the rain out of the bus stop, gives me so much hope because that's the first step towards all of this great transformation in our communities. So small wins give me hope.
I couldn't agree more, and I think that's such a consistent element that we bring to our groups. It gives wind in people's sails. They can look around and even see from 20 years ago a small mural project or something that still holds on, and you realize, oh, that was part of that earlier effort being made to improve our places. If we carry on in this long lineage of doing so—so folks, this is Mary Kate Norton. I'm so glad that you've come on today as our guest on Bottom Up Shorts.
Thank you so much for having me. That's great to have you here.
Let's see where this journey takes us in the coming months and years. Really excited. As always, if you are interested in connecting with our Local Conversations program, head to strongtowns.org/local. Sign up to be trained to be a local leader, or you may actually already be on the fast track because we will help with the training. But there may already be several individuals in your community that have also stepped forward and said, "I'd like to get a group going. I'm a little bit tentative about this," or "I'm a little bit nervous."
In those situations, we have resources to help you sort of navigate those tensions, those challenges, and take that small step of meeting together and connecting over a cup of coffee or at a park or whatever it looks like—at a city council meeting at some point along your path—and through that, helping to deepen connections in your community.
So with that, thank you for listening to this Bottom Up Short. Take care and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.