The Bottom-Up Revolution
Brian Kelly and Braden Schmidt went from curious residents to leaders helping redesign streets, modernize zoning, and unlock safer, more affordable neighborhoods in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. In this conversation, they share how modest first steps—showing up to meetings, testing a parklet, repurposing old materials—grow into city‑wide change. Their story traces the path from tentative beginnings to a community that’s learning, iterating, and steadily becoming stronger.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey there, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and this time I get to do another Strongest Town Contest interview with representatives of one of our Final Four contestant cities — Sheboygan, Wisconsin. With me today are members of the local conversation group Sheboygan Active Transportation: Braden Schmidt and Bryan Kelly. Welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm so glad to have you here.
Braden, why don't you introduce yourself to the group?
I'm one of the co-founders of the group. We call ourselves Sheboygan Active Transportation, and I nominated us for the Strongest Town Contest this year.
Brian joined a little bit later, having found us through Strong Towns. Once we joined as a conversation group, we showed up on the map. He found us there and has been part of the group ever since.
Fantastic. What is it about Sheboygan that makes it a prime candidate for the Strongest Town Contest?
In my nomination, I was really inspired by some of the stories we were hearing in our local conversation book club.
There were a few examples. Ruth from St. Luke's Church runs a warming center in the winter. She noticed that all of the public restrooms shut down in winter, and people just needed a place to use the restroom. So instead of waiting for the city to do something, she went and got a
porta-potty and set it outside her church and met that need right away. There's also ReBike — one of their members attends our local conversation as well. They take donated bikes, fix them up, and give them out for free to people in the community who need them. It could be kids who want to bike and can't get one otherwise, or people who just need a way to get around town. I was really inspired by those stories. That's so in the Strong Towns mindset that I thought it would be great.
Brian, what are some of the challenges that Sheboygan Active Transportation — and the broader community — are seeking to tackle right now?
There are a few things — some that face a lot of communities: a shortage of housing and affordable housing, and access to transportation. Sheboygan is an older city with a pretty nice grid system, so you can get around some places, but there are also areas of our network where state or county highways run through and it's difficult to get around.
But I think what we started here with Sheboygan Active Transportation was to address not just those issues, but how to empower people to actually figure out how they can get involved in addressing them. Braden gave some really good examples. What Sheboygan does well is people just go out and do things. There are tons of examples like the ones he cited, but it's not always easy to understand where your opportunity to get involved with local government is. So we try to bridge the gap between the doers and the thinkers, between the public space and the private space — help them see eye to eye and understand that we're all trying to build a strong town and we all have a role to play. We do some education, some connection, and a lot of community building.
That contrast between "somebody should" and "we will" is such a powerful thing. I see that spirit in all of our local conversation groups. Braden, as you've discovered the work that was already underway, what would you say are some of the traits of the people doing this work in your community?
We have people like Ruth and others from the warming center and ReBike. We also have people like Kate — they just want to help, they love helping people, they are great community members who bring people together. That's really what Strong Towns has been for me. They're truly inspiring community members.
You were able to open up a street for more users by turning it into a parklet. You went and got serious about it — trees, benches. Can you share about that project and the benefit of iterating and learning how to adapt existing public space to better serve more people? What did that look like, and can you tell us about that little park that's become a great outdoor dining and hangout spot?
It's called the Town Parklet, and it's a great example of people figuring out how to get stuff done. It was the brainchild of a couple of business owners in the area, including Kate — who Braden mentioned, who was part of our local conversation and helped start the group. She'd been dreaming this up for years, trying to get in touch with people at the city to figure out how to do it. Eventually — whether it was our group helping to shine a spotlight on these conversations, or just finally reaching a critical mass of people interested — she was able to get hold of a few people at the city in the Department of Public Works to figure out how to put it together.
It's been iterated on a few times. The first version had a couple of signs to block the road and some concrete barriers. They took those concrete barriers and added old bleachers that were torn out of an armory that was demolished in Sheboygan a few years ago, turning them into benches. It was a great example of doing what we could with the materials we had on hand. It wasn't perfect the first time, and they're still iterating on the design. But it continued to grow in its use — from just an outdoor dining space to a space that last year hosted a number of free concerts. A donor stepped up to sponsor different musical events, and there will be even more this year. It continues to evolve over time, but it came from someone having an idea, wanting to bring it to life, and then finding the opportunity to work with the Department of Public Works to shut the street to car traffic and open it to all sorts of other uses.
That pilot project kind of opened the imagination of the city. We have a farmers market not too far from there, right in our downtown, and it was growing beyond what that park could support. Last year, they shut down the street that most people cross to get to the farmers market, and they were able to bring in food trucks and other vendors and make it a lot more accessible — so people aren't trying to dart across the street during a busy farmers market.
You're from Wisconsin, so I can use a hockey analogy. As my son is learning to play hockey, we buy him used equipment. The idea isn't that he'll always have the exact same equipment, but that he'll figure out how to use it, grow, develop — and at some point he may get his own pair of top-of-the-line skates, but we're not there yet. Repurposing old bleachers is part of saying, "Let's work with what we have. This doesn't have to look like this forever," because there was never an intention of this being the finished, permanent state. Instead, we're driving toward a place where we're routinely taking what we have, making more of it, and eventually letting some of those things become the best version they might be.
Is there a human component to that too? You didn't all start out as rock stars in this space, but you're quickly becoming that. What's that learning curve been like, and how are you helping each other?
It's difficult to figure out who the decision makers are — who the people are who can make things happen — when you're trying to connect the private and public spaces. As our group has grown, that's probably been the most challenging part, and it's still one of the challenges we face going forward: where do we go to talk about these things? There isn't a committee meeting for parklets. You have to figure out how to find people and make connections.
There are people in our community going out and doing things, and there are people in city government working to address these issues, but they're not always able to connect. We're trying to find ways to help those people connect with each other — whether by attending the right committee meetings or creating spaces where we can have those conversations. That's probably one of our areas of struggle that we're still working through, but it's also a huge area of opportunity if we can get all those pieces to connect.
What are some of the things you're looking forward to? No matter the outcome — although I have great confidence that people are going to turn out in droves to vote for Sheboygan — what are you looking ahead to?
We actually have quite a few things going on that I'm excited about. We're working through our zoning code. It's more of an all-at-once overhaul, which I'm not thrilled about, but we are getting a lot of the Housing Ready Toolkit items implemented in the draft version. ADUs, duplexes — those are being legalized. Minimum lot sizes are coming
down, and we're starting to allow things like cottage courts. I'm really excited about making more of those Housing Ready Toolkit items a reality.
We also have a street safety initiative where we're doing pilot projects similar to what the Crash Analysis Studio tries to do — taking a dangerous intersection where a lot of crashes are happening, doing a pilot project, trying out a change, seeing if it works, and getting feedback from that. I'm really excited about both of those initiatives.
Maybe this is a little grim, but if a dog in the community bites someone, sometimes the owner has to put it away, or sometimes they muzzle it. We've never done that with streets — we seem to figure we'll just leave things a little longer, let things be as they are. If we don't hold that standard even with a dog, what about actually beginning to tame some of the most ferocious and fearsome places in our community?
I appreciate that sense of urgency, that sense of ownership of the problem. Do you want to share what you hope will emerge as a result of being part of this Strongest Town Contest?
When things are controversial in our city, it's really easy to get adversarial — to always be trying to stop something or find a way to disagree. What we're hoping to highlight is that being a strong town is not just about the end state, because we're not at the end state yet. It's about the process. It's easy to get caught up in the pain of trying to make changes or go through some of these evolutions. Every decision is always going to be up in the air, and not everybody will agree.
But if we can help people see that there are people in Sheboygan out here doing great work, taking the next right step, and that those things can grow — I'll leave you with one more example. Our food pantry, which has now grown into a warehouse with trucks and a whole organization, started fifteen or twenty years ago with a woman in her own home who got a refrigerator, set it out, got people to help stock it, and just had that be a spot. Of course, this isn't allowed in the zoning code, and of course there are all sorts of regulations, but she identified a need and found a way to do it. She's the same person who took it from a refrigerator all the way up to the organization it is today.
Sheboygan is full of people who can and will do these things. There isn't a problem too big for us to solve. We have everything we need right here. We hope that this competition and the conversation it creates helps to inspire people to see that we can overcome these issues, work better together between our community and our city government, and keep working to be a stronger town.
You're both fantastic communicators of this message. Can you offer Bottom Up Shorts listeners any tips or suggestions? Brian, I'll go to you first. What's a tip for somebody who says, "I'm a little nervous about this," or "I feel like what they're doing is so unique and I can't match it." How does somebody get started, and what helps them walk a good path?
I had no background in city planning or anything like that. I found Strong Towns through YouTube channels — Not Just Bikes, then Strong Towns — and that's how I found our local conversation. For quite a while, I just showed up to meetings. I didn't know how to proceed or what I could do, but I kept showing up. Eventually an opportunity arose where I thought, "Hey, I can actually help with that." From there, it was just slowly growing and learning more. Now I feel like somebody who can start to answer questions — if someone asks what's going on in the city with something, I know exactly what's going on.
I would say: just start small. Go to a book club. Go to a social group with people who are trying to do some good in the community, and just grow from there. Say yes.
I love that — just saying yes to the opportunity as it emerges, instead of waiting until you're a master of the subject or have advanced degrees in every conceivable topic. The realization is: I can work with what I have. What about you, Braden?
Brian nailed it. We need more people like Brian. That's the situation — be like Brian. I found people talking about this but didn't find anybody else doing it, so we started our own little group and built a social media presence. I have a marketing background, so I was able to do some of that. Then Brian found us. More people found us. Brian is going to run for city council now.
It's just an example of everyone bringing something unique to the table. I brought some marketing ability. Kate is a connector of people in the community. Brian has been willing to dig in and do whatever is needed and learn whatever can be learned. Just figure out what you can do to help, start doing that thing, and find some other people to do it with.
That reminds me of something Chuck said years ago on a member drive podcast: "Love your place, and it will love you back." It begins with that sense of almost unconditional love of place — even if it haunts you at times, when you see where it might otherwise be or the challenges we face. When we commit to that action of love, it makes a massive contribution.
Definitely go and check out the StrongestTown.com website, where you can learn about how to vote for Sheboygan in the Final Four. To follow along with the Sheboygan Active Transportation Group, find them on Facebook at facebook.com/sheboyganactivetransportation. On Instagram — there's an underscore between Sheboygan and active transportation — it's @sheboygan_activetransportation. That's where you'll find info about them.
Brian, Braden — fantastic. Thank you so much for being on Bottom Up Shorts today.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Thank you.
Folks, go vote Team Sheboygan. I am definitely on board. Have a great rest of the day, 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.