The Bottom-Up Revolution
What if your neighborhood could raise the money it needs without waiting for grants or traditional funding? Kathleen Minogue, founder of Crowdfund Better, explains how crowdfunding builds financial resilience while strengthening community bonds and local ownership.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens. Happy New Year to those listening. This is the first show that I'm recording in the new year, though probably not the first one you're listening to because we had some done in December. But I'm excited to be back, and excited to bring you more conversations with interesting people who are taking a bottom-up approach to improving their communities. One of the questions that I am personally most interested in when I think about cities is, "How can communities have more agency, more power when it comes to making the decisions they need in order to become more resilient?" One of the biggest hurdles for any community to confront is that of finances. Your town might have a list of great ideas and all the initiative, and they've all read the Strong Towns books, but the room can go quiet when it's time to talk about money. "How are we going to fund these improvements? How are we going to fund these ideas?" The best you've probably heard is "Maybe there's a grant somewhere we can find to fund these improvements," and that's fine, but I think it's time communities begin to innovate how they think about resourcing themselves and their futures.
Today's guest is going to talk about one possible innovation. I know when you hear it, you might furrow your brow and think "Wait, what?" But stick with us. It's going to be a great conversation. It's going to be interesting. She's going to talk to us about crowdfunding. Kathleen Minogue founded Crowdfund Better in 2012, leveraging her experience in the finance and art worlds. When she saw how crowdfunding could help artists launch their projects, she immediately saw the opportunity to leverage that approach to help nonprofits and communities reach their goals and to fund projects not typically supported by traditional finance. She is the creator of The Crowdfund Better Process, the first crowdfunding technical assistance curriculum built to increase campaign success while strengthening business fundamentals, and the Crowdfund Better Certified Advisor Program, the first professional development training program for advisors. I'm looking forward to bringing you this conversation. Kathleen, welcome to the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.
Thanks, Tiffany. It's super fun to be here.
I'm looking forward to speaking with you even more than I have already. I know we've been able to chat and connect in recent weeks. So, to start things off, I mentioned in your intro that you have this interesting background in both finance and the art world. Can you share about that background, and maybe you can tell us how that led to crowdfunding? What was that journey? What was that connection like?
Absolutely. In my early years, I was all about theater and dance and the arts, and I pursued theater in college. I got a master's degree in movement, so I spent a lot of time in that artistic, creative space. One of the things that always stuck with me was this mindset of "Let's come together and make a show," and you pulled all these resources together, and you created something from nothing, and that community and collaborative approach is a huge piece of who I am and the work I like to do.
Fast forward through different iterations. I also have a background in education, so I have taught middle and high school written curriculums, but I found myself at JP Morgan during the dot-com boom in tech investment banking. I will spare the story of how that all happened, but I got a bird's eye view into who was getting funding through those kinds of venture capital and angel investing paths, and who wasn't. And it stayed with me.
Fast forward again. I had a beautiful daughter, my life changed, and a friend of mine said, "Hey, would you produce my film?" And I said, "Well, I've never produced a film before." And she said, "Well, that's okay. I really just want you to help me find some money for it." And I said okay, but it wasn't that easy. It was a film about four women in their 40s. There weren't many production houses that wanted to produce that. So I said, "There's this thing called crowdfunding." It was 2012; Kickstarter was starting to hit the airwaves. I said, "Do you want to try?" She said yes, and we just did whatever work we thought was necessary. We launched the campaign, funded it. The film was made. We went to festivals.
What stuck with me is this: Don't wait for permission. When producers said, "No, we don't want to produce this film," we said, "Well, but there are people who want to see this film. There are people who want to be a part of this film." That was proved to be true when we ran the crowdfunding campaign. So that's how I entered into the crowdfunding conversation. There's a lot of story from there, but I think it's that mindset of "We can do it, and we don't have to wait for permission." That's one of the things I just love about crowdfunding.
Let's talk about crowdfunding a little bit more for people who may not be super familiar with the concept or how it works, or for people who've heard of it and they're not so sure about this. How do you explain it, and how do you tackle some of the hesitations or the doubts about crowdfunding, especially when we're talking about not just the art world, but also thinking about this in a more broader scale when we're thinking about applying this to a community context?
That's a great question. I love this question because one of the biggest misconceptions is that crowdfunding only has one flavor, and how I think about crowdfunding is old fashioned barn raising using modern tools. So we've been doing crowdfunding for generations. It's actually not new at all. It's simply that we are using it differently. So we don't have to geographically be in the same place. We don't have to literally be building a barn, but we're getting a group of people together, contributing resources and creating something that wasn't there before, something that the group wants.
I think one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have is that it's all about money. It's really about people and relationships. You don't have to have these huge social media followings and huge lists. If you have a network of deep relationships and people really want what you are proposing, you can be just as successful as someone who has thousands and thousands of Facebook followers, for example.
There's all different tools. So it's not just the donation crowdfunding, personal cause, emergency type of funding. We have funding for entrepreneurs where you're helping an entrepreneur to manufacture a product and get it to the market. We have crowdfunding where communities are coming together and deciding they want a pocket park, and the city doesn't have the funding. So what if we all get together and raise the funding? If we can get the city on board and they say, "Well, we're a go, but we don't have the funding," then you say, "Well, we'll bring the funding." Then there's even investment types of crowdfunding where the community can literally become a financial stakeholder.
That's what I find so interesting about it, because in the conversation about, "Well, what does it take to become a strong town? What does it take to become more resilient?" I think agency is big part of that conversation. Resourcing is a big part of that conversation, but also figuring out how do we function as a community, and how do we bridge the gap between what might be institutionally possible and what we actually want to see. Because sometimes they don't talk in the same room, what the institutions say you can have in your community and what people might actually want and what might actually be needed. Often those are very different conversations. I would just be curious if you have any thoughts on that.
I want crowdfunding in the picture with all different types of funding because they play different roles. When you have a foundation, they have a particular mission, and they're trying to use the money in alignment with their mission, in alignment with the people who are funding them, so they don't always have the room for innovation. That's what crowdfunding can really be helpful with: Let's test things out with a little bit of capital, see what works.
We've seen some really powerful examples of nonprofits and community projects and businesses who had difficulty getting access to some of that institutional funding, whether it's bank loans or grants. They launch campaigns, even small campaigns, and those institutions look and say, "Oh, well, the community wants that, so we need to take that more seriously," and they have an easier time getting that next round of funding, and even that larger round of funding.
That just makes me think that we don't have to think of crowdfunding as a competitor against typical capital. We can think of it as that first small step. Strong Towns is so big on that, taking that incremental approach. So if you can demonstrate that a community can come together and translate buy-in into actual capital, let's say $5,000 to fix a problem, that sends incredibly important data to those bigger investors. But it also can kind of be sort of a test of "Can we bring ourselves together around a shared goal?"
I think it can kind of bridge that gap, and it can be a complement to traditional funding. It doesn't always have to be a competitor to it. But if that traditional funding is still turning its back to you, who knows, it can step in and bridge the gap between vision and actualization of possibly great improvements in a community.
I like to talk about it as stepping stone. So it can be stepping stone to other funding, but it also can be stepping stone in terms of crowdfunding. So you might start with a really small campaign, and then you're building momentum, and then maybe you set your goal higher and set a more ambitious goal. We have a lot of folks who start with the more donation and rewards types of crowdfunding, really get the buy-in of the community, and then feel like they're in a place where they can make that leap into investment types of crowdfunding where the raises are significantly larger.
I would be curious how this affects just the general psyche of a place, because I think so many of us are used to people coming in and doing things for us with these faceless, probably well-intentioned developers, or the faceless entrepreneurs. All of a sudden there's a new, random T-shirt shop. The future of cities often feels so faceless. It's just a mystery project, and you're driving by it constantly wondering what it's going to be because you don't know. You don't know who these people are, you don't know what the conversation was like, you don't know where the money's coming from.
When I hear, when I think of crowdfunding, I think of it also from this perspective of humanizing the future of a community and humanizing what it becomes, where it's no longer this sort of mysterious process by which your community becomes what it is. I think there's just something, even just thinking beyond the money, it's kind of giving people a chance to go back to that idea of barn raising. We can build a place together. It doesn't always have to be someone doing it for us. We can actually do this ourselves. I think that could just be really powerful for the way a community sees itself.
Absolutely. We're seeing, for example, there is a developer who is creating capital stacks to allow local neighbors to invest in acquiring shopping centers in their neighborhoods. So they're putting together a larger capital stack to do a lot of the heavy financial lifting, but the community gets to participate and be investors in the assets in their community. There's just so much creative work that can be done, but the first step really is being aware that these tools are out there.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about Crowdfund Better. Can you share what is Crowdfund Better? Maybe you can share a bit of the origin story and more just about your mission and what you're working on.
I would love to. Crowdfund Better is an organization focused on education, strategy, training and support for whoever—communities, nonprofits, small businesses—that want to use these community funding, which is another way of looking at this, or crowdfunding tools to fund whatever. And I do mean whatever, because people say, "Well, what can you crowdfund?" Well, anything the community is willing to support you can crowdfund.
Crowdfund Better really started from those days when I had successfully funded my campaign. There were a lot of folks who said, "How did you do that?" So it just started organically with working one-on-one with others who wanted to use these tools. But it became really clear really quickly that the very people who could benefit the most from these tools knew so little about them. It's human nature. If something's unfamiliar, you're generally not going to try or dive into it.
With my background in education, I said, "Well, what if we build curriculums? What if we build tools? What if we could go into small business development centers and economic development and share the stories of how crowdfunding works and what it is?" I asked all those questions, and then said, "Okay, I think I'll do that." So that's really our heart and soul: to bring the crowdfunding opportunity to as many communities, small businesses, nonprofits, community projects as possible.
You mentioned crowdfunding versus community funding. Can you flesh that out a little bit more? How do you like to help people who've never heard of this before think of it differently, in more of that community perspective? I know we touched on this already, but would just love for you to add any other thoughts to that.
Sure. Crowdfunding sometimes people focus on the crowd, some random assortment of people. So I like to use the term community funding to re-anchor it back in the reality, which is only people with whom you have trust and relationship are likely to contribute money. So that's part of why I like to use those terms side by side. It isn't a random crowd.
Truly, some people have a real negative picture of crowdfunding from people are always raising money for emergencies. Community funding is much more like we're going to embrace what the community needs and together as a community, we'll fund this together. So they are interchangeable, in my mind, but one really focuses on the people and the relationships.
So I would love it if you could share what makes a successful crowdfunding campaign. Could you share maybe one or two insights thinking specifically about folks who might be interested in using this more in the community context, like that little park or whatever they might be thinking of. What have you learned about what makes crowdfunding work?
So what makes crowdfunding work is a network of people who care deeply about a mission and are motivated to take action. So yes, there are other elements putting together a story, and there are outreach and communications pieces, but at the heart of it, anything that the community can rally around could be crowdfunded. So that's one piece.
Then you do need a compelling story, and by that I mean the story that speaks to the people you are looking to have support you. Then the part that often is forgotten is a plan for reaching those people. So you have a great story, you have a great mission, but how are you going to reach the people who are likely to contribute?
This doesn't mean there's a lot of stereotypes about crowdfunding too. It's like, "Oh, I have to do Facebook ads, or all this social media." Really, it's asking yourself where do the people who I think would want to support this hang out, both online and offline. If you have a coffee house or a cafe, do they have a bulletin board, or would they be willing to put a little loose site stand with a flyer about the project on their countertop? It doesn't have to be digital. But really thinking about, how can you get the message out? Is there a group chat board? Are there meetings you can attend? So really thinking about the real ways that information is traveling in your community.
Can you talk about the Crowdfund Better curriculum that you developed to help make more campaigns be successful, and also the advisor program, just to kind of give you a chance to flush those out a bit?
Sure. So what we discovered when we started this work is that one of the biggest issues that was standing in front of crowdfunding success was people really understanding how it works, and that once folks understood how it worked, their success rates went up almost immediately. So the Crowdfund Better Process is reverse engineering those early years of working. It starts with education. So what is crowdfunding? How does it work? What are the different types, what kinds of things you can crowdfund?
It moves to strategy, which is okay, now I know what it is. How does it or doesn't it work for the project I want to see funded? What can I do to be more successful, and what types of crowdfunding pathways are open to a project like mine? Then in that process of strategy, we're doing assessment. So do you have what you need to do that outreach? Do you have the tools? Do you have the team? Do you have the skills? You'll need someone who can write some copy. You'll need someone who can create compelling visual tools, whether those are videos or photographs.
So we created a curriculum. It's a four course curriculum that walks you through how to gather your network, how to put a compelling story together, how to use tools like email. Email is the most effective tool for crowdfunding outreach when we're talking digital. Then we have courses on rewards crowdfunding and investment crowdfunding to help folks understand the nitty gritty there. Then the last piece is support. So once you've done that work and you feel ready to go forward, some feedback from people who have been down the road before.
We have seen that folks who are willing to do the process and really take the step-by-step, our clients who use the process, they meet or exceed their goal over 90% of the time. So I'm always encouraging folks to take a look at that because it's also online, it's anytime, it's asynchronous. So it's great for folks who are doing this, not as their full time gig.
Then the Crowdfund Better Certified Advisor Program takes that Crowdfund Better Process and empowers advisors to guide community members through the process. So what we felt is that the people in the community, the small business advisors, the economic development folks, they really understand their community so much better than we can ever understand. When you also put the knowledge of a small business advisor together with crowdfunding, it becomes twice as powerful.
So we created this professional development training program, and we're really seeing the difference for bringing this information to communities through the voice of trusted advisors, also people that the community really trusts, and who also have skill sets and have other resources. We talked about stacking capital. We're seeing a lot of that with these business advisors: "Well, we could use crowdfunding, and then there's this grant, and now we can put this micro loan." So the program empowers those professionals with the information to work on the ground with folks in their community.
Could you share one or two stories, or maybe examples of how you've seen this approach help, whether that's a small business or a community, achieve a goal that was important to them?
Absolutely. When it comes to different goals, I've heard people say, "Well, we can't seem to get our micro businesses out of the garage and get them to the storefronts in our downtown." We had an entrepreneur who had a decoration business that she was running out of her bedroom, and she used crowdfunding to buy some new tools to get out there and do more pop-ups. Within two years of her campaign, she found a space to sublet, sort of a pop-up inside the local pharmacy, right in the middle of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. So she went from micro business in my bedroom to I have a storefront. And she has continued to thrive. So that's on the sort of micro level.
But we're also seeing crowdfunding as last mile funding for projects that already have gotten a start. So we worked with the Panhandle Affordable Housing Alliance in Kootenai County in northern Idaho, and they have a project called Miracle on Britain to create workforce housing that is shared equity fee simple homes. So I won't describe what that is. You can look that up, but they had about a $250,000 shortfall from the money they had raised. They came to us and said, "Do you think it'll work to go to the community and ask them to support us in making sure our workforce can afford to stay and live in the community?" And they did. They raised $250,000 through their crowdfunding campaign to finish that project.
These stories just make it really clear to me that crowdfunding, or community funding, is partly about the money, but it's also about, I just, it really does feel so focused on people. Because thinking of that young lady starting that decorating business, she could have gone out to get a grant or a loan or something, but just thinking about how less personal that is than having 100 people, or however many, pitch in, because all those people are invested emotionally on a personal level in her success.
Or thinking of the community, it just totally changes the dynamic when people have been able to say, "Oh yeah, I gave $50 to that." I just wonder how that could change how people even think about the community and the neighborhoods where they live if they're driving around seeing things that they have actually been able to invest in and feel just more personally connected to. More personally connected to their community in that way, whether it is a taco shop they helped get out of a food truck into a storefront, or those small businesses, or something bigger, what you just described.
It just feels very personal to me, a really personal approach to, in a way, to allow these people to build trust too. Because I think that's another part of it, is the trust-building and the storytelling, because it also changes how it feels for those entrepreneurs. They have 100 neighbors backing them now, and that feels very different. I think it feels very different than just having one banker behind you, although I'm sure they take it just as seriously. But I think you know what I mean.
Absolutely. The entrepreneur with the decorations business, she said it changed how she perceived herself as a business owner to have the support of others. I can speak as someone who's backed campaigns and invested in campaigns. I go out of my way to go to the coffee shop whose crowdfunding campaign I support, even if it's not convenient. I'm like, "Well, I've got to."
If we're talking about how we can help these businesses, including legacy businesses, to endure and to grow in our communities using these crowdfunding tools, where you literally feel invested in the success, could that make someone just go downtown rather than to the big shopping center?
Yeah, exactly. But also thinking of the bigger picture here, if cities really are, a big part of the Strong Towns message is this financial resilience and realizing that a lot of our cities simply just don't have the money to fund the types of investments and improvements they need to make to last, to win at the infinite game, as Charles Marohn says.
I think this really is a powerful tool to think about, "Well, if we want to tackle our commercial vacancy issues, or if we want to invest in incremental housing, or if we want to test that bike lane to see if it helps, or that traffic calming project," I think what you're getting at here is "Hey, this is a way we can empower ourselves, not only to fund those ideas, but to really shift the entire way we see ourselves."
So how do you see that? How do you see the connection between kind of what we're advocating for at Strong Towns and the crowdfunding approach? As people listening to this probably are thinking about things like bike lanes or incremental housing, how would you bridge the gap between what you do and some of these core campaigns, or these core solutions that we think about a lot at Strong Towns?
Absolutely. I mean, I see so many parallels between the Strong Towns philosophy and what you can do with crowdfunding. In fact, we looked back after a decade of working with clients to see what made the clients who were super successful, what made them successful. What we learned is they had something in common. Community wasn't an afterthought. They had been building with community since the very first day. So it wasn't, "Oh, I need funding, now I have to build community." It was "I'm going to build this business that is answering or responding to a need I feel someone needs to respond to in my community. But when I do that, I'm going to involve that community in every step of the way, have conversations, get feedback."
People often think of crowdfunding as the moment when you start funding, but some of our most impactful campaigns, they worked for a year ahead of fundraising to understand what the community wanted, went out and did surveys and spoke at churches and really engaged with the community. Then the crowdfunding campaign was a tool that they use to coalesce all of that excitement, because there is a time limit. It becomes a motivating event for the community. They have something specific they can rally around. There's this page. You can see it, you can engage with it, as opposed to "I'm having conversations, but not sure where it's going."
I had one client who said, "Everyone says it's a great idea, but no one would write me a check." I launched the crowdfunding campaign, and someone came up to me and handed me a $5,000 check that day. So what's the difference? I had an entrepreneur who said his uncle knew he was starting this business, but it wasn't until he launched the page that his uncle said, "You're for real," and handed him a check.
So there is something here about starting with those conversations, but that crowdfunding can help coalesce some of that energy in a specific place. We call that the build with community mindset.
Something, it brings people to a decision point. Because you can have it in your head, you can even believe in it with your heart. But when you put that page up and you say, "Hey, we've noticed this problem, we're ready to tackle it and we're ready to even find the money to do it within our own community," then it kind of moves people outside of just observing and supporting and prayers and thoughts to decision time.
I think people respect when someone says, "Hey, I'm willing to take this risk, and I'm actually willing to make this happen." I think it just kind of brings something, it can bring some, with those stories, people pulling out their checkbooks and saying, "Okay, you're serious, and now you've given me a clear way to step out of just observing and to really step into a moment of action."
To just circle that, to make the full circle here about the resilience being a theme, we have data that shows that businesses that crowdfund beat the odds when it comes to survival rates, and that community projects that use crowdfunding, the community takes better care of them. They're better tended. They stay in better shape. So we do even have some data that's saying longitudinally that investment stays with a business, stays with a community project.
I think there's another thing to be said there as well in terms of resilience, which is that if you have a community that can band together to support the kinds of things to actualize its own vision, I think that ties into resilience as well, because you're strengthening those social ties and you're strengthening the tie that a person has toward the community that they live in.
I just wonder how that would change how people feel about their community if it was like, "Oh, wait, last year I gave $1,500 to various businesses through crowdfunding." All of a sudden you start to feel like this is something resembling maybe home, and that's a big part of resilience: people who actually want to stay for the long term and want to invest and want to have a way to solve problems.
I really do think this is just one part of, as I've been hosting the show, I keep listening to so many interesting people who are coming up with interesting ways to solve problems, and I think that's what people are really looking for. I think people want to be part of solving the problems in their community. Sometimes I feel like there's sort of this parachute dilemma, where the people who are responsible for solving problems just kind of keep floating higher and higher up in the sky, farther and farther away from the actual community.
I think there's just real demand and real longing for people who live in a place to have a tangible way to solve the problems they see without it having to be outsourced to some random professional or be cloaked in language they don't understand, or involve highly technical bureaucratic processes. I think people want to say, "Hey, we noticed this problem. We were able to come together to fix it." I think that's part of the resilience formula as well.
Can you talk to me about the crowdfunding mindset? So this is something that we were talking a little bit about in our offline, our unrecorded conversation. What is the crowdfunding mindset, and how do you tie this into your work?
So the crowdfunding mindset, that build with community mindset, it says from the very first moment, the community is central to whatever you are doing. We have this "Got to do it on our own" mentality, "Bootstrap and pull up and muscle through." Or "I'm going to figure it all out in my garage by myself, and then I'll show the world when it's all complete." We're missing out on so much by not involving other people in the process, both in terms of support for what we're trying to create, but also ideas and feedback.
One of the things that you get when you crowdfund is you're putting an idea out there often before it's fully formed. We have seen these ideas and products and projects, they get stronger with the input of the community.
So we call them the five pillars of the build with community mindset. So it's we, not I. So always we together. With, not for. So we're building with each other, not, I'm not coming in and going to solve a problem. Isn't that what so many of these outside organizations do? "We have the answer for you," for you, not let's build it with you. So that ground-up, just Strong Towns philosophy.
Here, not there. So right here where we are, let's fix this corner and not worry about trying to fix everything. Over time, not immediate. It does take some time to do this kind of community building. I know there's so many of you out there who do this work, it takes time, and so giving grace for that time to listen and to discuss.
Then finally, and it's kind of most importantly to me, you're building a culture. It's not just about a product or a project. It's a culture of working together. As you said earlier, Tiffany, if you can do this, if we can do this, then what else can we do? So it really begins with shifting the mindset to we together right here and creating a culture of that.
So Kathleen, it's 2026. I would just love for you to have a chance to share what are you excited about for Crowdfund Better in the new year, and just anything fun on the horizon, or anything particularly exciting that you're looking forward to pursuing as a goal?
Well, we're doing some new work with the National Coalition for Community Capital around community investment funds. So this is taking crowdfunding and kind of putting it on steroids. These are creating funds in communities that can fund real estate, affordable housing, small business. The tool that we're using in order to allow the community to participate is crowdfunding.
So we've got three projects on the horizon. I can talk about the Lansing Growth Fund in southwest Lansing. So we've got affordable housing, retail. But really, if you look at it, it's about reimagining the entire space. So there's sustainability goals, but the heart of it is that, as you're talking about, developers come in, they build, the community has been involved in the plan since the beginning, and they're going to get to invest. They're going to get to be investors in this fund, which will invest in real estate and small business and see that financial return. So it's something that's really meaningful to me, that this is also a tool to build wealth in communities.
Fantastic. I think we had on some of your partners in that project on the show not too long ago from Rhode Island, Jessica David, I believe. I think I had a chance to speak with her. I know they're doing similar work in Providence, which is really exciting in Rhode Island.
All right, well, in closing, can you share with us a little bit about your town? Where are you based out of? What do you love about it, and what are a couple of local businesses you like to recommend people check out if they were to come through for a couple hours?
Sure. I live in Boise, Idaho. I was thinking, because I knew this question was coming, about who inspires me here. I have to say, the work that our mayor has been doing to preserve green space is really inspiring. She wants there to be a park or some green space within 10 minutes of every family. Changing the cities, change the zoning in order to allow for density in your traffic transit hubs. So there's an energy around solving issues around housing and also preserving the nature that's here. So I love that balance. I think that is such a beautiful thing that Boise really is always going, "Okay, we want to grow, but how do we also preserve these beautiful foothills and all the things we love?"
In terms of the places I love, I'm going to shout out my Common Ground Coffee and Market. They use crowdfunding. Right next door, two doors down, is the Creative Arts Collective, and they do wonderful work in the community with the arts. Down the street is the Capital City Asian Market, and I of course love the Boise Farmers Market and all of the community that the farmers market brings. Then just down the way is the Old Speak Book Beer Bar. So it's a bookstore and a brewery. Both Old Speak and Common Ground, they really act as these beautiful third spaces where the community can get together. They engage other small businesses in the community and host book groups, and it's just the beautiful way these small businesses work together and build community.
Amazing. Thank you for sharing that list. To our listeners, we'll definitely be putting links in the show notes, per usual. We'll put links to Crowdfund Better so you can learn more information about what Kathleen is doing and all of the recommendations she just shared with us. Kathleen, thank you so much for coming on the show with me and sharing about your work. It's very inspiring to listen to, and I hope our audience finds it inspiring as well.
Well, thanks so much. Tiffany, Strong Towns is definitely an inspiration for us here at Crowdfund Better too.
Love to hear it. To our audience, thank you for joining us for another conversation. I'll be back soon with more. Don't forget that you can nominate someone in your community who you think would make a great fit for the show. Until we return with another episode, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
The State of Strong Towns meeting is coming up, January 29. If you are already a Strong Towns member, consider this your invitation. You will receive the link and updates directly in your inbox. If you're not a member yet, now is the time to join at strongtowns.org/membership so you do not miss it. We will share where the movement stands, how it got here, and what lies ahead in 2026. We really want you there.