Chuck Marohn  00:00

Hey, everybody. This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast.

Once a year in January, we do a state of Strong Towns address. I actually started out doing this as a State of the Union address kind of thing, kind of opposite of what the President would do. I'd be, here's the state of Strong Towns. I like doing it. It's a lot of fun. We like doing it as a team, and it's a good way to kind of organize and kick off the year, to have this address that we give to our members, and then we follow up with a members conversation.

So I spent two and a half hours a couple weeks ago doing this event with our members. It was really great. We're going to release the audio. This is a presentation, so you can actually go to YouTube and find it too and see the slides. I don't think you need to get the slides to hear what's going on, but that's what we're doing today.

Just a little programming note: We start the year. We had some staff structural changes at the end of last year, and I've been filling in. Basically, I've been doing three jobs—my job and then a couple other jobs—to start the year. That is changing and changing rather soon, and I'm going to be shifting back into my normal role.

One of the casualties of this shift has been this podcast. I've just not had the time or the energy, or really the structural support here to do this in the regular way that I typically do. So we're back to lining up some guests, looking at topics, doing some stuff, and you should expect to see us back to regular scheduled programming pretty soon.

Anyway, state of Strong Towns. Everybody out there, stay chill. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  01:59

Today, as we start our 2026 state of Strong Towns address, I want to recognize our founder circle members. If you are here, I'm going to show the second screen in just a moment. Feel especially that sense of deep gratitude for what you did in saying I need this in my community. I need these ideas to take root where I live.

From those humble origins to be able to then say that we've got not just—if we kept up a list of the 6500 members, we'd be here all afternoon. There's something so powerful in people having taken that initial step to kick start the Strong Towns movement, to really help it take root, that now we're at a place where there would be a much larger process to go through to be able to identify and list everyone.

So to Mike, to Nate, to Pat, to Peter, to Rick, to Russell, to so many more: Thank you for being part of the Strong Towns movement and helping to initiate what we now see in front of us.

With that, it is my privilege to be able to introduce to you Chuck Marohn, who's going to be taking us through the state of the Strong Towns movement, introducing us to various challenges that we face, but also addressing many of the core things that have happened this year that we together have contributed to and making these things possible. Chuck said he doesn't need an intro. He probably doesn't. Please welcome Chuck Marohn, and take it away.

Chuck Marohn  03:24

Thanks, Norm.

I've seen a list of the founders circle members, and I'm terrible with names. I really am. I will meet people, and I know I should know their name and I don't. I feel like there's a part of my brain that got cracked back in 2004 when I got in a car crash and had a really bad concussion. You just don't do well with names.

I can put a face to almost every one of those names. It's so cool, because really that was 2013 when we did that initial kickoff to membership. I want to say there were 150, 200—it was a small group of people. Edward, you were one of those who really were saying, let's do this. Wow, just really, thanks for sharing that norm. Those people mean a lot to me and to us and to everything we've done here.

So let's do this. I always feel this great privilege of being able to share here, and that you all take some time to say, let's take stock of where we're at. I want to take the block of time I've got here to look back a little bit on where we've been and the trajectory we're on, but really look forward as insiders, as part of this movement, as people who are in the tent. What you should look forward to, what you should expect over the coming year from us here at Strong Towns.

That looking back part, I want to start with a little bit, because if you go back to 2013 when we did the founders circle and started our membership program, and really even back before that when we were just starting a blog that was sharing ideas. Early on, we said we need to grow our footprint. We need to reach more people. 15 years ago, that meant social media.

When we kicked off our strategic plan, our idea that we were going to really grow the movement, here's what we did in terms of social media. You can see that 2013 kind of inflection point. We started to reach a lot of people. Back in those days, you could share something on social media, and then people would click on it and go to your website. So our website traffic just exploded. We were able to, through a little bit of targeted advertising and really working on our messaging, reach a lot of people, diversify our audience, reach a lot of different voices, bring a lot of people into our conversations.

I like to point out in 2015 our annual traffic, the total number of people that visited our website, was 70,000 and that blew my mind. I mean, that blew my mind. I remember the first year doing this, it was maybe 1000 or 900. The idea of 70,000 was just astronomical. But by 2021 it was 2 million. That's what changed in that period of time. That initial period of Strong Towns was growing this message and reaching new people. Probably a lot of you came in during that period of time.

As we were into that, our local conversations group started to pop up, and we started to see groups forming and calling themselves Strong Towns This, and Strong Towns That. We would talk to them and say, what are you doing? They'd say, we don't know. We just love Strong Towns, and we want this to happen here.

We put some oomph—our members really helped us put some oomph behind this program. I want to just reflect a little bit on what has happened. Over the last three years, we've seen a tremendous growth in the number of local groups we have. We now have over 300. We have them around the world.

When you get your annual report in your email, open it up and look at it. There's a page on there about local conversations. I think there's two pages, and one shows here's all the groups that we have, here's where they're at. It'll blow your mind. It's really amazing. But then you'll see this number of ones in formation, and that number will really blow your mind.

Those groups are not just in the United States and Canada. Those groups are in South America, in Australia and New Zealand, in Asia, in Europe, and we have got one in Uganda.

This is the eternally humbling part about doing what we're doing. I started working on this set of ideas that I thought were applicable to central Minnesota. Then people outside of Central Minnesota, throughout the state, kept saying, come here, talk to us about this. This means something to us. Pretty soon it was Midwest, and pretty soon it was the United States, and pretty soon it was North America.

We have—and I say that, me initially, then a whole bunch of people adding to this mix of this conversation—grown a set of ideas that we are finding day in and day out are more and more universal.

I say all this, and I get this lead up, because I want you as our members, as our insiders, to understand the shift in strategy that we've been going through. Our traffic on our site has been declining, and been declining for really three-plus years now.

This is a broader media trend. We have studied other websites, other people who are doing similar work, other people who are doing related work in different fields. Everybody who was good at the prior mode of generating traffic has seen traffic decline, and it's happened significantly to us. We've seen our website traffic go down.

That being said, our membership is still growing, and our membership is growing really robustly. I want you to understand the implications of that and what it means for how we are presenting information and sharing stuff and working to accomplish our goals.

We've demonstrated that our movement can grow even when our web traffic doesn't. That's a big kind of mental separation for us between our founders circle era strategy and today's strategy.

All of this is to present, tada, our new website. If you visit strongtowns.org, the actual URL, our address in the digital realm, if you are on our site, you noticed, maybe you noticed. Maybe it just happened, and you didn't notice.

In September of last year, we launched a brand new website, and I think it's important to understand—well, let me without going into too much detail—our old website was on Squarespace. I built it myself back in 2008. It has had a number of iterations, but for any of you that know Squarespace, it's a site designed for people doing small things. We are not doing small things anymore. What we're doing is really complicated, with lots of moving parts and lots of different stuff.

For about the last eight years, there's been a faction within—internally here—saying, we got to get off of Squarespace. We got to do something different. I have been, maybe an over indexed voice saying, let's be patient. Let's do it right. Let's not do it hasty. Let's hack this and make it work and try to make it go.

We finally got to the point where we could make the leap. We had both technical expertise internally. If you haven't met Evan, the guy who works on our website, you haven't met a genius mind. We had the direction and the guidance and what we were trying to accomplish. Even more importantly, we had a different vision for what the website needed to be: not a place to have discovery of Strong Towns or take people who are brand new to Strong Towns and introduce them to it, but a place where people who were looking for answers could go and kind of navigate themselves deeper into the conversation.

I'll just give you a little bit of insight. Squarespace cost us $250 a year. The new website is 25 grand a year. That's the kind of leap that we made in terms of technology back end, the ability to do things.

So when you're on our website and you're experiencing the interface, what you are seeing now is our extension of a content strategy that is fully matured from that founders circle era to today. If you follow us on social media, or you follow us on YouTube or any of the video channels, what you are seeing is our content strategy being kind of stretched out.

We are no longer trying to do what we would call discovery content on our website. We're doing that at the far reaches of our social strategy. What we're trying to do on our website is take people who are slightly oriented to Strong Towns, get them more deeply oriented, and then bring them deeper into the conversation.

You should see over the coming year, a lot more things be built into that framework. We want to make it really easy for members, for local conversations, for others, to be able to share our stuff, to be able to share it in concise, coherent ways.

We often have critiqued ourselves internally, saying the Growth Ponzi Scheme is one of our greatest insights and most shareable things. How do we share that with people? Well, it's kind of contained in six different blog posts over multiple years of writing. What we want to do and what we're working to do with this website is make those core ideas and core insights very shareable, tangible, understandable, and then tie them directly to a journey, an internal journey on our website that would bring people to action.

Thank you for giving us the bandwidth, the capacity to make that investment. I want you to know that we didn't—we intentionally did not launch it the way you see other places launch it. It's not our MO anyway. But I want to just reinforce the idea that what this is designed to do is to make it easier for you to be the heroes of this story. That's what our website is to do.

Chuck Marohn  13:20

This year, we also launched, and this is—I'm looking forward here—we launched a new program called the City Partnership Program.

One of the things that we have always been kind of inundated with, but not really had a good forum to respond, is direct assistance to cities. A lot of cities have called us and said, would you do this? Would you do that? It was a lot like consulting. We have a very intentional approach that we just don't do consulting. It takes away momentum from what we do. We don't do consulting well. I did a little bit of it back in 2012, 2013 under the Strong Towns banner, and it just kind of killed all the momentum we had.

We are more geared up to be larger picture thinkers, move the conversation, shift things, and let other people kind of carry the in the trenches kind of work.

That being said, there are a lot of people who work for cities who want to be part of the Strong Towns conversation. There are a lot of people who would like to be members, but don't really have a mechanism to do that from within City Hall. There are a lot of people like the great mayor of Duluth, where I was meeting this week—picture, this photo with me, I think is on this call, Norm—who really want my team to understand Strong Towns ideas, recognizing that this is not a switch I can flip overnight, but this is something that we need to work on over time.

The City Partnership Program is a program specifically for City Hall to give people in City Hall, kind of in bulk, access to all of the trainings and the courses and the email interactions and the ability to go to any Strong Towns thing, and all the stuff that we do. Give that to people in city hall so that we can start to build those muscles and that conversation within there.

I know Carly asked me to say we have this initial outreach that we're doing that ends at the end of this month. So if you're interested in the program, [email protected]. You can actually ping her right now in the chat and she'll tell you how to get all the things. Or you can go to this part of the website. We will be doing this for an extended period of time, but we had this initial group we wanted to work with and get the program kind of calibrated just right.

On our housing campaign last year, we put out the first two toolkits. If you're here today, you've probably been part of one of those conversations along the way. I want you to know that the third toolkit is in production. That's probably not fair. It's in R and D. It's been in R and D for a while. It will be in production at some point this spring. I hope to have it out in the first half of the year. We'll see. That's a goal.

This is a troika of how do we implement this stuff on the ground. We really are looking at our members and our local conversations in particular to be the conduits of this. We are trying to design these things to infiltrate City Hall. Boy, we need to get housing built. How do we do this? Well, here's how you reform your codes. Here's how you help people stand up and be able to do this work. The third toolkit will be: here's how you put financial heft behind that and make it work.

I'm deeply appreciative of those of you that have brought this to your local leaders, your local government, and say, Hey, this is the low lift way to get started. These are partnerships that we need to build. Just want you to know that the third toolkit in this series will be coming this year.

We also last year launched the finance decoder. I have to say this was a long term dream of mine, to be able to put complex financial information into a system that could deliver it to people in a relatively simple and powerful and coherent way.

We have a lot of gratitude to express to Michelle Duran Wood, who helped us, I think, with the kind of intellectual breakthrough that made this happen. I want you to know the first version of the decoder was designed to be free for everybody to use, to be very simple. The second version of the decoder, which we are working on now—we've got a big meeting that we're planning this year to get some really smart people back in the room and kind of hack the second version. The second version is also going to be free for everyone to use.

The thing we are trying to work on, really two steps: One is we want to make the extraction and creation of the materials even easier. When we did this the first time, ChatGPT was on version three. Now it's on 5.2. We're kind of optimistic that where you might have had a 10% failure rate before, you're maybe down to less than 1% failure rate. A lot of this stuff can be automated in a really friendly way. We want to make it so people can find their data, drop it in, and then get the stuff really easy, without having to do even any math. We also want to be able to check people's work really quickly. Part of the second version is going to be doing that.

The other thing, and I think this is the thing that is most important and most urgent for me right now: This is a really great tool for starting a conversation, but that conversation is not helpful unless it gets into City Hall. There has got to be a dialog that we create for members to be able to take this to the cities and not have it be scary for local conversations, to introduce this stuff in their community, and not have it be threatening for people within city hall, whether they're in staff or in leadership, to be able to use this tool to start a conversation that, as we've framed it or tried to frame it from day one, is more about trying to seek understanding than seek blame.

That's hard to do, because these numbers don't look good, generally across the board. I mean, they affirm the story that we've been telling now for a decade and a half, which is we've grown our cities into insolvency. When you look at the results from over 100 communities now—Asha updated us today. We had a bunch more submitted, and we're over 100—we have a compelling story of city fragility that is being told here.

Like most Strong Towns things, that's not where we want the story to end. We want the story to end with a recognition and then a change in approach. How do we use this tool to bring about that change in approach? That's really going to be the thing we're working on internally this year. Again, really powerful kind of stuff.

I share this with my mom and my dad, and I'm like, hey, what do you think of this? They're like, I wouldn't want to be that city. Those are the kind of things that the finance decoder makes really simple. We have to get to the next stage of saying, okay, how do we do something different?

I also want to just point out—I don't even know, I think Norm, you know who this is. I don't know who the Hudson finance decoder project is. I think Edward, you know—I've seen this page pop up with them, and I just wanted to add it because I really want to meet whoever's doing this. There's some group out there who's taken the finance decoder and said, Hey, we'll do yours for you. Let's help you with it.

I get people contact me all the time. They're like, can I use this to do da, da, da? My answer is yes. I'll reaffirm for all of you as members, our model of change is to have everything be as open and available and free to use as possible. We look at members as this source of financial strength. We're not trying to make money off of charging for these things. What we're trying to do is build a groundswell of a movement that supports the development and the distribution of this kind of product.

For us, when we see someone taking it, even if they're taking it—I don't know what this group is doing, but even if they're taking it from a consulting standpoint, and say, Hey, can we incorporate this into our annual audit?—that's really great. As far distribution as we can, that's what the ultimate goal is here.

We have been running the crash analysis studio for three years now, and that work has all been based off of grants that we have received from a very generous donor who's wanted to be anonymous, but has really wanted this work to move ahead. I'm going to say I feel like we've made a ton of progress here in that we demonstrated that we could do this. We demonstrated that it was an effective and non-blame, non-accusatory way to get at important insights about our transportation system.

Chuck Marohn  22:54

But what we have failed at thus far is to get it in City Hall as something that cities are broadly ready to do. We have a couple that have done things. We have one city in, I think, New Mexico or Arizona, who actually has just made this part of an RFP process they're doing where they said we want you to help us set this up.

What I'm just going to say, and I'll be candid with all of you, but there's candid, and there's more candid. I'll be very candid. We have our last round of funding for the crash analysis studio that we're working with now, because basically what we told the funder early on is, hey, we're going to do this thing and then people are going to adopt it, because it's obvious that it should be done.

When that didn't happen, we said, we're going to do this additionally to make that happen. Because we've not had widespread adoption, the last time we went back to our funder and said, Hey, we're still committed to this, they said we're committed to it, but you need to show results.

We set results as cities actually having their own crash analysis system within city hall, where when they have crashes, they are doing them. We set a threshold of having a dozen of these done by at some point next year.

That being said, this funder gave us the money to do technical assistance around this, and so we have money to go to cities, help train their staff in person, help train their staff on Zoom, meet with them, walk around, do a community conversation around supporting this, meet with their city officials. We actually have the funding and the capacity now to go out and do this.

We're ready to provide that support, training, events, workshops, evaluate success, help walk you through getting it set up. Here's a catch: If this is you, if you're like, my city needs to do this, I'm really in, we don't have the capacity to do this with everybody who says I would like this. I love all of you. We've got 6500 members. There's a lot of people who are like, Hey, we should do this in my city.

We actually need to see wins and understand our theory of change and how wins are important, because we have this very sophisticated media approach. When we get wins on the ground, we can amplify those.

Our approach has always been a Johnny Appleseed of ideas kind of approach. We spread ideas around. Some places they take root, some places they don't. When they grow, we highlight that and it inspires others.

In this instance, we are actually looking for the most fertile ground to plant seeds. So we're looking for cities that are prepared to put skin in the game behind this, where there's political support for doing this, where the technical staff is like, Yep, we're interested. We just need help doing it, where the city is ready to take action, where we have those things in place. We want to talk to you right now, because I'm ready to put dates on my calendar. We've got a team here that's ready to come out to your place. We're ready to work with you to make this happen.

We're not asking for any matching funds, any—we're just asking for your skin in the game. Your time and energy. We want this to happen because we want to get on a path to having safer streets.

Again, I'm going to point you at Carly: [email protected]. Ping her right now. She doesn't look busy enough. We are looking for candidate cities that we can start this conversation with, and we have the funding. We have the capacity to put real heft behind coming out and helping you get over this hurdle so that you can become one of our crash analysis studio success stories that we can share with the rest of the world.

I want to preview something else that we are doing that is going to be different and perhaps a little challenging to who we are and what we do. I had someone say to me this week in a different context, but I think the same kind of vibe, Strong Towns doesn't do national issues. I kind of—I don't know what you're talking about. We've always talked about systems of growth, systems of change. What we've said is that our responses generally need to be bottom up. We need to be working first in our neighborhoods, in our places, with the tools we have.

That doesn't mean we've not had things to say nationally about systems that need to change. One of our five priority campaigns is based around ending highway expansions. Ending highway expansions is, while there's a state component to this, the thing that drives highway expansions is federal transportation spending.

From, the original articles on the infrastructure cult and things that I wrote way, way, way long time ago, to articles that I've written, even that's going to come out next week on the North Star project here in Minnesota, it's always been focused on how do we change this federal funding system.

Right now there is a big vulnerability in that the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which has been insolvent for almost two decades now, comes up for reauthorization at the end of this September.

Let me be clear: we're not a lobbying organization. We don't think we can kill the Federal Highway Trust Fund, but there's enough question around it right now that it feels like a moment where asserting a different set of values, a Strong Towns framework around this issue is going to generate the kind of conversations that we think need to happen around ending highway expansions.

What you're going to see from us—you've already seen it. So far this year we've kind of upped our ending highway expansion related kind of content. Next month, we are going to have a big web session where we are going to invite people, journalists, others, to come at the release of a white paper that we put together called Mission Accomplished.

The synopsis of Mission Accomplished is that we set out to build the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. It was a very different program. It ran fairly well. We can—I think we have a lot of issues about how things were built, but the idea of building an interstate system was one that likely needed to happen, and the federal government was the proper place to do it.

But that system was largely completed, in a sense, mission accomplished by the early, mid to 1970s. The last actual piece on the initial plan was done in the 1990s. Since then, we've had a lot of destructive drift. We have so many things we need to do in this country, and you can line up whatever your priorities are, whether they're onshoring manufacturing and building out the electric grid to green energy and other related things. Go on and on down your list. All of those things require commodities. They require asphalt and steel and concrete. They require human workers and human capital, all things that right now are getting sucked up by a legacy system that just builds more and more and more highways to less and less and less effect.

I want you to all be prepared for our messaging around this, because it is not necessarily going to be accompanied by a local action, as much as it's going to be kind of this broadly message stuff around how we want to see the world shift and be different. Look for that in the coming weeks.

I'm also gonna give you a preview that we're not ready to announce right now. As with kind of all this insider stuff, we're kind of trusting you to be part of the team and let us roll this out when we can do it for maximum effect.

One of our five priority campaigns—I've gone through the other ones, the transparent local accounting, safe and productive streets, incremental housing everywhere, and highway expansions. I just went through all those and the things we're doing on each of them.

The fifth priority campaign we have is end parking mandates and subsidies. I want to tell you that this campaign is going away. We are going to retire it. We're not going to retire it because it's done and every place has ended parking mandates. We're going to retire it because we have taken this campaign as far as we need to to have the ball rolling organically downhill.

We think the work that the parking reform network is doing is fantastic. We see the momentum. Hundreds of cities have adopted these changes. Now. When we started this campaign, it was a handful. There is a ton of momentum and kind of broad recognition that this needs to happen. We're still going to have this as an issue we care about. It's still going to be part of our other campaigns, in a sense, but we are going to retire it, and we want to do that in a way where it can be kind of a celebration. We think this is now a fait accompli, and we want to be part of making that so obvious that this is what you need to do.

We're doing this because we want to make way for two other priority campaigns that we're planning to add.

Chuck Marohn  32:05

The details are still being worked out. We had a board retreat last week and talked about the language and the framing of this. None of this has been finalized yet, but I want to give you a slight preview.

We are looking at a campaign centered around bottom up job creation. The next book that I'm working on, which I'm going to talk about on a slide or two, is about this issue, and we want to have a set of strategies and approaches that we can share with people around that.

The other campaign we're looking to add is really about civic institutions and building up local governance. You have seen us over the last year in high fidelity, but in years even prior to that, having these sometimes heated conversations about what the role of local government, bottom up support, bottom up institutions are, how we do things effectively at the local level.

We are really strong believers that local government is not the lowest form of government in a hierarchy of governments. We're not the algae of government. Local government is the way we collaborate in a community to get things done. That collaboration happens not just with individuals, but with institutions and organizations across a community. We want to focus on strengthening those, because when we say housing reform needs bottom up action, I am sympathetic to the people who say, okay, Chuck, where is it? I'm sympathetic to that critique.

Safe and productive streets needs bottom up action. All right, Chuck, show me the city that's ready to do that. I will acknowledge that our cities are really struggling in this way. We think that there are things that should be done, could be done, need to be done to strengthen this. We think we are uniquely positioned to be change makers in that area.

What we look at is our sixth priority campaign will be something around that. Look for that in the coming months.

I mentioned the book. I have a contract right now to write what would be the fourth book in the Strong Towns series. For those of you that don't know, I initially pitched a book to Wiley, and in our back and forth, of course, it became a five part series. I have a kind of handshake contract agreement to do five books with Wiley.

The first one is the Strong Towns book on cities and city insolvency and complexity, and what we do about that. The second one was on transportation. The third one was on housing. The fourth one, as I said, will be on jobs and economic development. The tentative title is More Than Just Growing. The fifth book will be on local government and civic institutions and how we actually implement a bottom up revolution. Then maybe I'll just fade off into the sunset, and you won't need to hear from me anymore. We'll see.

But look for that. The manuscript is in the works. It's due at the publisher in August. I said I wanted to have it to them in March. Let me just say March is not going to happen. If I get it to them in August, that means it will come out sometime in about February, March of next year. If I get it to them earlier, we might be able to move that timeframe up a little bit. So let's see what happens.

For our members, tickets are on sale right now for the 2026 national gathering. We are going to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and are so super excited about this. Fayetteville has been for a long time a city that has been innovating, doing interesting things, embracing the kind of development pattern that we want to showcase with this event. We think they're a great host, and we've had some really exciting conversations on the ground about programming venues and how we're going to make this work.

Tickets are on sale right now. I realize I don't have the dates in here. Carlee, I'm going to ask you to join for a second here and give me the dates, because I don't know about the time I had, and I know you do.

Carlee Alm-LaBar  36:14

May 18 through 20th, and I just put it in the chat as well.

Chuck Marohn  36:18

All right. We're going to have tickets available for members exclusively here for a little while. Let me go on to the next slide, and then I'm going to talk about the gathering again.

Oh yeah, let me do this first, and then I'm going to tie it all together here in a second. Three years ago, we had Majora Carter as our keynote speaker, and I was so proud of that moment, because she's so dynamic, and had a ton to offer about how we see our communities differently and how we turn that into action.

Two years ago, Barkha Patel was amazing, and I just can't stop talking about the woman who took the job at city hall that nobody wanted and nobody thought could be done, went out to the shed, got some paint and got to work in the most kick butt Strong Towns kind of way, just an avatar for everything we want to be.

Last year, we had Chris Arnade, and I know for many of you that was an amazing conversation, and for others of you, you're like, what are we doing here? To me, Chris talked about the reason we do this work. Literally the dignity of people on the ground and how we express that and how we understand that.

In this vein, we have invited Sam Quinones, author of Dreamland, the least of us. If you listen to the podcast, late last year, I interviewed him about his book The Perfect Tuba, which he called a very Strong Towns book, and I tend to agree with him. Sam has agreed to keynote our conference.

Sam's perspective and the perspective that I really want to—

Chuck Marohn  37:56

Let's say we had a lot of names we were looking at. I really wanted Sam, and I don't know if I just drug everybody. I think everybody is really happy about this internally, but I think I also drug some people to cross the finish line on this one, because there were a lot of other great names. Let's just put it that way. Not that anybody's like, well, no, we're not sure about Sam.

To me, Sam, and if you read the article he wrote about Hazard, Kentucky that I did a podcast about with him a couple of years ago, where he talked about a city of people with a downtown of people who had been through drug addiction recovery and basically were unemployable in kind of a traditional sense, living in the city and making a go of it, and making a go of it in very kind of Strong Towns terms. How do we start with what we have? How do we use that as the next step and the next step and the next step to build off of, and how do we have that be bigger than the sum of its parts?

I think Sam has some beautiful Strong Towns related insights on how people who are left behind are really an example for all of us. It is this kind of—I think when I say humility, I'm really contrasting—I don't want to be too grandiose about this, but I'll focus on myself. The engineer planner mindset in America today is a big, top down mindset. It's a big project, big picture. I know the answer. I got the perfect solution. I can get a big grant. I can do a big project. We can borrow lots of money kind of mindset.

I feel like what Sam reveals for us, and what I'm so excited to have him share with us, examples in the world, is how that bottom up, incremental approach at its most humble, at its most kind of left behind, destitute, not expected to perform, actually does miracles. Actually does amazing things.

I feel like it's an inspiration for us, because literally, the thing that is our greatest challenge, often working with cities, is not a lack of resources, it's too many resources crowding out the next incremental thing we should do. It's not being able to humble ourselves to see the power of that next thing.

So look forward to Sam and look forward to a whole bunch of other stuff in Fayetteville.

I said I was going to wrap this all together. I want to wrap it with the civic leaders summit. This was something that we were invited to participate in last year, kind of a second conference for Strong Towns that we did in Pensacola with our friend Quinn Studer and his group there. I have to say, going into this, I was excited. I mean, we did a conference in a baseball stadium. It's pretty easy to get excited about that. We literally had breakout sessions in the concourse and in the locker rooms and that kind of stuff. It was a really cool venue.

But I was excited to give this a try, because what Quint is trying to do, and really this gels with what we are trying to do from a sophistication standpoint, is have programming that really focuses on people in City Hall and how they make change.

I'm going to share a framing for you that is not a perfect framing, because I think the Venn diagram here is a lot of overlap, but I want to share with you an internal framing that we are working toward.

The national gathering, because of the growth in attendance and the growth in popularity, and how many people are in our movement, and the growing of that, the National gathering is kind of morphing into an annual get together of members, local conversations, people who are generally non-technical professionals doing bottom up work. I'm not saying "That's exclusive. If that's not you, you can't attend." Please attend. We want you there. But a lot of the programming that we're doing at these are really geared around the questions and the struggles and the success stories that that kind of group of people is uniquely having.

The civic leaders summit, because it was so successful, we want to do it again and again and again. We want to shift the programming there to really be geared around elected officials, high level technical professionals, people who are implementing from that angle.

Again, this doesn't mean that other people can't attend. This doesn't mean that other people aren't welcome. We have a broad door. We want everybody to be welcome. But I want you to recognize that we are kind of working to shift the programming, because it's hard to fit it all in the national gathering. I'm also a little bit concerned that as this thing grows, people are going to get squeezed out, because we don't want to have a 2000 person conference in a big ballroom. It's just not our vibe. It's not what we do. It's not the kind of thing that leads to the conversation we're having.

So we are trying to think ahead and continue to evolve this. While I think we've got the dates for the civic leaders summit, you can't get tickets yet. It's going to be in September sometime. We're working toward that. National gathering is on sale now, coming up. Go members go, local conversations. Everybody be there. It's awesome. Fayetteville, civic leaders summit will be some point this fall in Pensacola again, which who doesn't want to be in Pensacola in the fall?

Last year, we introduced our cohort program and graduated our first class, and we intentionally don't use the word fellows. I'm not sure why. I think we had some internal debate on that at one point. But the idea here is to stand up special leaders who have stepped forward and said, I really want to be a local leader for Strong Towns in my place. I want to be that difference maker, that change maker.

We have our second class, our cohort class, that's working through right now. The idea is, we start last fall, and we're going to kind of culminate in bringing everybody together in Fayetteville at the gathering. This is a very special group of people who, to this day, continue to do amazing things. We featured a lot of them in our content. You're going to see a lot of them in locomotive. These are kind of the cream of the crop, so to speak, although that makes you all sound like you're not cream of the crop. You're all cream of the crop. But these are the cream of the cream. I don't know what to say.

Anyway, I want you to know that this is out there. We'll be starting our next cohort sometime in September, October, applications. Again, this is one of those things to contact Carly for if you want to be on the list of people who are in this. We're super excited, because what we're doing is we're growing high level capacity across the country. When we do 25 of these every year, after four years, you've got 100 people out there who are high level advocates of the stuff we're doing. That is super exciting.

Marion, Ohio, we have had a lot of Strong Towns champions. In fact, we've had 10 Strong Towns champions. We've not had one that struck me as deeply as Marion Ohio did, and I'm so proud that they carried our banner last year and into this year. I'm so proud that we were able to share their story and their success and who they are as a community, as a model and an avatar for all of us to learn from.

We did a great video on Marion that talked about their story and talked about really the successes that they have seen, doing Strong Towns like actions. I was able to visit Marion and meet with them, get a beautiful tour of the city, be there with people when they watch the film, chat with them. This has been a great experience, and I just maybe want to take this opportunity again to congratulate them, thank them for being part of our movement, thank them for all the work that they've done, and just say that we are continually inspired by you. I'm looking forward to you being part of the upcoming strongest town contest.

Two things different about this contest this year that I want to point out. The first one is that we have a sponsor for this program. We have been kind of trying to find the right way to bring someone in, because this contest is all about highlighting the great things that places are doing, elevating. We're like, we want to have someone who can help us do this at a new level. You all know urban three. They are the best of the best at doing the work that they do in the trenches in cities, helping cities understand their financial situation, giving them not just the analysis but the maps and the language and all that, to be able to communicate these things to people. The idea of having them as a partner that can help us plus this contest is really important. It's really important to me, and I want to just acknowledge and thank them up front.

The other thing is that we are doing the contest a little bit different this year. One of the things that we have been a little frustrated with internally is that we have all these cities do all this stuff to be part of the contest, and we start with 16, and then after one week, we're down to eight, and eight communities that are awesome get wiped off the map in five days. It feels a little un-Strong Towns.

What we are doing this year is we are going to start with 20 teams, and we are going to take the first two weeks of the contest and have what we are calling a showcase. The showcase will look a lot like the first round, except it will be kind of at large voting. At the end of that at large voting, we are going to seed the top eight teams.

So we're gonna have the same—it's gonna be the same length, the same period of time, but start with 20, have 12 of them stick around for two weeks and then fade away, and we'll focus on the final eight. So a little bit bigger, a little bit bolder, a little bit more stuff, a little bit more action, a little bit more celebration of greatness, more stories, more stuff, and we think a better overall tournament.

If your city is one of these places, we've got a form to fill out. Strongesttown.com. Go there, submit your nomination.

I'm going to reiterate what we reiterate every year: we are not looking for perfection. Strongest town contest is not about finding the city that has everything figured out. It's about the city that is earnestly trying to make things better, and when we can highlight that and showcase that and show people places that are doing great work, that is how we inspire others. That's how we build strong towns.

I'm going to shift here and end with a little bit of internal talk about membership and kind of how we're looking at our member growth.

Last year, we set out with a really bold ambition to grow our membership. In some ways, we were successful. This is the last two years of member growth. Two years ago, this election year. If you remember last year, we were here at state of Strong Towns. I showed you how in June, when the Trump-Biden debate happened, in June of 2024, our new members just dropped off. It sucked all the oxygen out of the room. We saw that reflected in people who ended up at the end of our pipeline and said, I'm ready to become a member. I want to be part of this.

Then after the election, we had our member drive, and then bam, we were kind of on trend again. You can see last year was, I think, more of a normal year, and so we were kind of on trend throughout the totality of the year.

We think it's really important that we continue to grow our movement. It is not the only thing that we're trying to do, and we try to balance this with the other things that we do. That being said, we have always looked at as a reflection of our success, if we are relevant, if we are helpful, if we have things that are going to make the world better, that is going to be reflected most clearly in people standing up and saying, I want to be part of this. I want to support this. I want more of this to happen. I want this to be expanded.

Understand that we are focused on adding more to our numbers here as an important part of our strategy. We're also focused on retaining people who are members. Internally, when we talk about retention, we're really talking about how many people in a year that are with us that stood up and said, Hey, I'm going to write you a check. I'm going to take out my credit card. I want you to do this well, and I'm going to be part of it. How many of those people feel the same way a year later?

Chuck Marohn  51:00

Part of that is contacting them in the right way, in the right frame, because I can show you under the hood, we have hundreds of members who are active, who are doing things, who are opening our emails, coming to our website, signing up for things, downloading our toolkits, but whose membership has lapsed. They're just not counted in this list. They're on the ones that have gone away. So we know that there are some people who are not active members who are still active.

But this dashboard reflects kind of our year over year over year, retention, retaining of existing momentum. I want to give you a number that we've kind of indexed on. If you look just nonprofits in general, a nonprofit retention rate for donors is somewhere around 40 to 45%. We are around 70%, and we've been in that 65 to 70% range for a long time. We have a very loyal and committed group of people who support us, and when that group has continued to grow, it has not watered down that loyalty and support.

I just want to pause here and acknowledge that and thank you. I always am heartbroken when I see the dashboard and says, Oh, we have 800 active members who have expired, and we send them an email and say, hey, your membership has expired, and then they don't come back. I'm like, why? What are we—

On the other hand, I look and I'm like, wow, we started the year last year with 5,800 members. 4,000 of them are still—those are any other nonprofit would die to have those numbers. That's astounding, and it is a testament to all of you and your steadfastness and your commitment to what we're doing. So thank you.

I want to talk about something we are doing to—I'm going to use my words. I think other people internally might have a different way to say this, but I'm going to say it on my way—to improve the member experience.

Right now, if you're a member of Strong Towns, we produce a lot of content, a lot of stuff that gets out in the world. There's a lot of conversations going on, some of them more redeeming than others. We have long had a request to have a place where members can go to get easy access to resources, to each other, and to high level, thoughtful conversation. This has been a priority for a long time, and I'm excited that we're finally able to make it happen.

For those of you that are familiar with the circle platform, we have been working for a number of months now to migrate our teachable platform—so the Strong Towns Academy—migrate the Action Lab content, which is our kind of help desk, into a new platform using the circle platform that we are calling the Strong Towns Commons.

For those of you that are not familiar with this, you can—I mean, you can see the interface here. It looks very social media. It kind of has that vibe and feel to it. This is going to be a place for members to be able to get our content early. Be in a sense beta testers on things that we're going to launch, have internal conversations, be kept up to date on the latest kind of things that are going on Strong Towns, get access to resources, get access to our courses. When we're doing web broadcasts and other things, it's going to be a hub for that.

We're trying very hard to make it work well, which kind of contrasts with the Swiss Army Knife nature of it. So there's a little bit of massaging, and we've kind of taken it slow to try to make sure we get that part of it right.

But I want you to know now is that we are starting beta testing on this. We've invited a handful of people to be kind of the first round of help us figure this out and show us where it breaks and where it doesn't. The goal is, in the coming weeks to months, to expand this to all members.

I'm going to use a term that is a tech, out there term. It's not a term that I like a lot, but in a sense, this will be a gated site for members. We will have some stuff that is non member, but this will be a site where members can go and interact with other members without kind of the general insanity that you get in other spaces.

Let me give you a personal thing. I have always wanted to have a space where I can field questions that are not coming out of left field, questions that I can answer on a podcast, on a video, have a back and forth dialog with. It's really hard with Slack, Discord, my email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, all the places to keep on top of all conversations.

Being able to prioritize our members, being able to prioritize their concerns, their questions, their discussions, not only myself, but the rest of our team, makes this a really exciting move.

So I want you to know that this is coming. It will be, for the most part, a members only platform, and expect to see an invite to that in the coming weeks to months. I hope you find it valuable, and I hope you give us feedback to help us make it better.

Local conversations—I mentioned, I don't even know how to get my mind wrapped around this. In some ways, we're now over 300. We have over 1000 that are in some part of formation. We did a census at the end of the year. I know some of these are going to go away. I want to say this. I've said this to the team here. I want to say to all of you: when local conversations go away, that's a good thing. We want to actively make sure that these places are working.

Because what we don't want to do is we don't want someone who's ready to stand up, go find that they have a local conversation, go to it and have it not be effective and not working. So what we are trying to do is really train the ones that are ready and active and going to become better and better and better and more effective. Give them the tools, give them the communication ability to really be effective at what they're doing. The ones that are either falling behind or disengaging, allow them to move out of the way for others to take over.

So 305 is where we are at at the beginning of the year. You might see this number dip now in the coming months, as we kind of work through the end of that census process, but we're dedicated to this program and to making this work and to making these places really strong. I don't think that can be understated, the importance of it.

In an election year, I've been doing this for such a long time now that I have learned to loathe even years and love odd years, because it feels like in odd numbered years, we're able to have conversations that are more helpful and more productive.

Let me switch out of presentation mode for just a second, and then I'm going to finish up.

I recorded a podcast this week, and we released that, and I won't give you all the internal things, but it didn't go through the normal process that we did, and I've gotten a lot of feedback, so much so that we took it down. It was a distraction to the conversation that we want to have.

In my inbox, it's been about five to one, "Hey, Chuck, that was awesome. Thank you. Why'd you take that down? I wanted to share it with people." The one was, "What are you doing giving comfort to Nazis?" There have been explosive conversations on Reddit that I'm—it has given me sleepless nights and a lot of anxiety. Not that it's about me, but I'm just saying it's been really hard last couple days.

I think I feel like I need to be clear with everybody on here about a couple things. First of all, I think you know me, at least I hope you know me. There's nothing about me that's neutral about violence, whether it's state violence or otherwise. I'm not indifferent, and Strong Towns is not indifferent to injustice, whether it's racial justice or structural injustice. We don't often use the language that others use, but if you dig not very deep, I think you see what we're about.

We exist as an organization knowing that systems can be cruel, they can be fragile and they can be destructive, and that is often by design. That often forces the most fragile among us to bear the cost. We talk about that not infrequently.

I think what I struggle with, what we struggle with as an organization sometimes, is what to do when everything's running hot all at the same time, when there's fear and there's anger and there's grief. What do you do in that moment?

My work, and the work that I've done throughout the life of Strong Towns, I mean, really going back to the mid 2000s when I was doing work here locally, but particularly as I've been able to travel around the country and really visit—I've been in every state. I've given a Strong Towns presentation in every state. I've visited every type of community, places that are very similar to where I live and radically different from where I'm from. It's been a humbling thing to get to know America the way that I have.

I feel like that experience has made me really sensitive to what has gone on with our discourse, and really what kind of a longer arc of, I'm just going to say, a descent from decency, or just the general division has done to us. I've watched our language become more absolutist, more demonizing. Really, in my estimation, more effective at sorting us into opposing camps. I don't think I'm being cynical with the expressed intention of having us oppose each other.

This kind of rhetoric is really powerful for mobilizing people around politics, around political wins, but I think it's really destructive. I think it's terrible for the slow relationship based, trust based kind of work that we are trying to do, to build places where people can live together, can govern together, can do collective things.

No town is going to be strong when the government is unbound by rules, by norms, when it behaves in predatory ways, when it stops serving people. No town is going to be strong. I watch what's happening in my state, and I'm heartbroken. I really struggle to find the words.

At the same time, I watch people in my state doing beautiful things. I recognize that our organization, our movement, can't become another arena for factional sorting where belonging depends on us saying a certain word at a certain time to signal to a group.

I'm convicted that our work needs to remain oriented towards restraint, towards humility, and the difficult task of holding places together when everybody else is trying to pull them apart. I am uniquely aware that that is not easy, particularly in a time like this, but I think that's the work that we're called to do, and that's the work that I'm going to try to lead us to do today and what's going on in my state, which is really hard, and throughout this whole election year. So let's just be kind to each other and start with that, and I think everything else will flow.

I want you to know there is this repeated mantra that I've gotten over the years that Strong Towns just works bottom up. Nothing big happens. Nothing significant happens. Why are you guys working so small? We need to get to the state legislature. We need to get to the federal government. We need to have a bigger impact.

I've always said we are changing all of those systems. We are affecting all the systems. There's no movement that is having more impact today on how we build our cities than our movement, and it might not start in Washington, DC. It might not have big legislation. It might not have a 503c4, or whatever it is, raising money and giving to candidates and all that. No, it also doesn't have all the compromises and all the things that go along with that.

But let's not pretend that it's not being heard everywhere and it's not affecting the way people think and the way people act. We have shifted the conversation in this country by being decent people, by insisting on bottom up, insisting on the framework that we insist on. We have had more impact than anybody else.

I just want you to know that we should stay the course, because it's working. It is working.

Thanks everybody. I know that we're going to do some questions, and I just want you to know that I'm here for it. Whatever you got, whatever you want to talk about. I don't think they give the President 20 minutes and he talks for two hours. I kind of feel like I just did a jerk thing like that, where I was probably supposed to talk for half an hour and talk for an hour, but I got a lot to share, and I love you guys, and I really am excited about what we're doing.

So Norm, they want to pass it back to you, and we'll take it from there.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  1:05:23

Yeah. So couple things. One, we're acknowledging we are past our initial hour, but do we have an hour? Well, yes, but we've taken more time.

Tied into that is we definitely had a couple of questions. One about the podcast and why, what was behind our decision to take it down? I think you addressed that.

Then another one was asking that if one of our priority campaigns could be around a land value tax, but you did talk about sort of our focus there. Do you want to just address, because it was submitted in good faith question, would we consider around the land value tax? But I know that's a big topic.

Chuck Marohn  1:06:00

Yeah, it's also—if you said me land value tax, we include—I mean, land value tax is one thing that's been in every single book I've written. It will be in the next book too. It's one of those things that is a brilliant, genius idea, but it's so pedantic. It's not the thing that I want us to focus on.

I've always said the best of all the bad taxes is the land value tax. Nobody likes taxation, but if you're going to have it, that should be the one we have. We're supportive of that. But there are other groups running with that. There are other groups better positioned to do that. It's really a statewide policy. It's not kind of the—it's that kind of the gel that we work with.

So, yeah, we're with you if you want to do it. My state is having a hearing on it next Tuesday at the state capitol. Cool. I hope it passes.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  1:06:53

Coming up in circle, you will be able to watch the session, the one hour session that we did on the land value tax with Joe minnikozi and two others, Greg, and I'm forgetting her name. So we definitely feature it in our content, just not as one of our priority campaigns.

Chuck Marohn  1:07:07

I feel like it's part of our transparent local accounting campaign. Right now there are a bunch of statewide movements, Florida being, I think, in my mind, primarily among them, that's trying to get rid of all property tax. Let's just not have any property tax. I'm like, okay, let's prop 13 every state. It works so well in California.

I think that we will be talking about this and be talking about the land value tax in conjunction with that. But in my mind, the rubric is under our local accounting campaign, local finance.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  1:07:40

100%.

Well, couple of quick things. First, thank you, Chuck. I really do appreciate the update that you provided.

Chuck mentioned, and this is coming up February 19, and Tony can drop in the chat the link to register for this, is our Mission Accomplished webinar. Really that focus on how do we adapt to the end of the interstate era? That will be a presentation by Chuck Marone, and going forward, we're going to continue to, every so often, do member exclusives like we did this past year, and this is the next one that is coming up.

Also, if Tony or another member of the team can share the link to the annual report, there's so much packed into it that I didn't want to share it until now, because otherwise you would have been so distracted by that you would have missed everything we've just talked about. So that is next piece of work that we put together. I think it's also a great entry point if you know someone that is generally interested in, hey, what is Strong Towns about? That may be something to share with them, or if you want, you can adapt it and use it for your own purposes. We definitely want to make that available to you.

I think as a part of our continuing obligation and commitment that we maintain a high level of responsibility for each of the dollars that are contributed, the vast majority of our members are giving, I think, $19 a year, and we know what that represents. I see the cancelation emails from people saying, I love being a Strong Towns member, but my family has just been hit hard. We have folks that have been sharing in the chat. I've lost my work. I'm looking for opportunities.

Simultaneously, we have others that have been a steady backstop to what Strong Towns is doing. So know also related to that, if you haven't got your tax receipt, if you're in a US tax filer, or if you're from another country, but you're going to file US taxes, you can use your donations as a tax credit. That has been sent out to you by email. If it hasn't yet gone out to you, I'm working on getting the last ones out, but the vast—I think we've sent out every last one of them, and so we're really close. If you haven't got it, reach out to me directly.

Lastly is, I just definitely want to close with appreciation for the time that we have together, a quick shout out, as Chuck did, to our ongoing cohort and encouragement. Also for those that knew Rachel or know Rachel quedon, Rachel quedon was a special part of the Strong Towns team for a long time. She has stepped back from her role at Strong Towns. She has a lot of family obligations and continued opportunities lie ahead for her.

So for those that engaged and interacted with Rachel over the years, she has written the second most number of articles for the Strong Towns website, and so I definitely want to give a shout out to Rachel. She has departed, but her footprint and her fingerprints are on everything. Huge kudos to Rachel for years of service and profound impact and contribution to the Strong Towns movement. She was the voice of sanity in so many different ways, and will continue to have that role. She leaves with warm affection and regard. So kudos to Rachel as well.

As we close, just want to thank you all for the time that you've taken here. Please do continue to engage with us, sharing your thoughts, your comments. They mean a lot.

With that, thanks folks for being part of the Strong Towns movement. 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.

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