Strong Towns has always warned cities about the danger of fragile growth. Now, Chuck is applying that same lesson to the movement he helped build. In this episode, Chuck explains why Strong Towns can no longer depend on everything landing on his desk, and introduces the organization’s new Executive Director. His guest shares how he found Strong Towns as a Sandpoint city council member, his organizing work in Idaho and at the League of Conservation Voters, and why he finally decided he had to be inside the organization, not just on the board. Together, they talk about culture, management, local conversations, and the kind of leadership Strong Towns needs for its next phase.
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. For most of Strong Towns' history, there wasn't much distinction between me, the organization, and the movement. There was a blog, a set of ideas I was trying to work through, and a growing number of people who recognized something in those ideas that matched what they were seeing in their places.
Over time, those ideas became conversations, and the conversations became a community, and ultimately a movement. Eventually, the movement required an organization capable of supporting it. One of the things we talk about all the time at Strong Towns is the difference between growth and resilience. Growth is getting bigger. Resilience is building the capacity to adapt, to endure, and to thrive over the long run. That's true for cities, and it's also true for organizations.
For a long time, if something needed attention at Strong Towns, it eventually wound up on my desk. That's not a sign of strength — that's a sign, actually, that we've reached the limits of a founder-led organization. One of the most important things I can do for the future of Strong Towns is make sure the movement doesn't depend wholly on me.
That's why the next stage of Strong Towns requires something different. It requires an organization where responsibility is shared, where decisions are made closer to the work, where accountability is distributed throughout the team, and where the success of the movement depends on more than the energy, attention, and capacity of a single person. My job in this transition is not to hold on tighter — it's to empower others to lead.
That's why today I'm excited to announce and to enthusiastically welcome John Reuter as the new Executive Director of Strong Towns. As Executive Director, John's role will be very different from mine. I'll continue serving as president, focusing on the work I've felt most called to do. John's job is going to be to lead the organization itself, to oversee our team, to manage operations and budgets, build systems, ensure accountability, and translate our strategy and vision into action.
Today, we're going to talk about John's journey, what drew him to Strong Towns, why he's stepping into this role, and what this leadership transition means for the future of the organization. John, welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast.
Thank you so much. It's great to be back on.
I read that statement, and I don't usually do that at the beginning of a podcast. I just want to make sure I got it right, because this is a pretty important time — for you, for me, for the movement, for the organization, for all of us. So thanks for sitting through that.
I love the care. I have to say, as long as I've known you, I've never seen you come on a podcast or a video stream and actually read something off a page. I recognize that as a sign of how much importance you're placing on this, and of you taking the time. But it also, I will tell you, is one of the most intimidating parts about working with you — how good you are at this. You come onto a podcast and you'll talk for an hour straight, and it's all just great. I'm sitting here going, this is great, this is great.
I'm sure you have some notes somewhere. In fact, I think you've shown me your notes before, and they are not detailed. They are not to a point that would actually be helpful to most people, and certainly not enough to talk for an hour. I think that's led you right, because you're always speaking from the heart rather than from a piece of paper. It's led to a radical transparency that defines Strong Towns — where you say, 'Hey, let's just open the doors and show people who we are, what we're about, what we're doing, what's going wrong, what's going right.'
I'm sure we could have buried this deeper, but in the interest of that radical transparency, that's the thing that most intimidates me about joining you in this work full time — this expectation that people are right to expect from institutions and organizations like Strong Towns: a radical willingness to be open about what's happening and really giving people that peek. I hope that will be a value I can continue and bring to this conversation. But you will see me with a notepad where I'll be jotting things down, because I like a note or two to work from.
Well, I've already lost control — and that's what this process is about. So there you go. I know this is not supposed to be a podcast about me; it's supposed to be a podcast about you. I already feel like I'm subordinating to John's agenda.
Not to talk about himself — that's very kind of you. I feel like over the years I've made you cringe a little with the transparency.
A couple of times you were like, okay, I've got to get used to this — that's what we do. But it brings a little anxiety for me. I like to think I'm very transparent, and I absolutely work at being transparent, but you set a different bar. We're going to work to maintain that bar, but it is a high one.
I don't remember what year this was, but I remember we had a grant that we were expecting. We were at a point in our growth where this was very important. We had it awarded to us, and we put it in our budget — we were expecting this money. It wasn't quite a doubling, but it was going to be about 30% of our budget. It was a big deal. We hadn't done anything really dumb like go out and hire a bunch of people and make a bunch of commitments, but we were counting on that money coming in. Then it didn't show up, and it didn't show up, and we found out in late November that it wasn't going to happen.
I remember being devastated, because we would have been okay, but we had all these plans for the next year that we were ready to kick off. I sat down and penned a letter to our members saying, 'Here's what happened.' I remember you saying, 'Ooh, Chuck, this cuts a little close to the bone,' because I said, 'Here's what we screwed up, here's where this fell through.' Our members responded with almost the same amount of money in about two weeks — just, 'Here you go.' I remember you coming back to me saying, well, you were more transparent than a normal nonprofit would have been, but that's kind of what we do.
So this is going to be a conversation about me saying nice things about you, and then you recounting stories where I was wrong and you were right over the years. Is that what we're doing here? I maybe have one more good dynamic, and then you have a ton where it's the opposite.
I do have a list of questions for you. I do want to make this about you, because I feel like people who are vested in the podcast and vested in the movement should know who you are and why we are entrusting you with the keys to the car. Go back and talk about when you first found Strong Towns. Where were you? What were you doing? What was the context, and why did what we're doing here resonate with you?
Sure. After college at the College of Idaho, I went up to North Idaho to start a newspaper — I'm not involved anymore, but it's still in print today — the Sandpoint Reader, up in Sandpoint, Idaho. Then through a series of both brilliant and devastatingly poor decisions, I ended up on the Sandpoint City Council.
The first thing I worked on in my first hour on the council was pushing to eliminate parking requirements for historic buildings in town. We had this old middle school that was trying to remodel, and the parking requirements were going to require them to knock part of it down, or limit how much of the building they could use, or require them to buy land next door and pave more. It was silly. So my literally first motion was to waive all the parking requirements — not charge them fees — just say, we want you to reuse this building, it's been sitting vacant, let's get it going.
There was clearly some commonality in thinking, and this had to be around 2008. Strong Towns was just a blog at the time and I wasn't aware of it yet, but we kept working on these things — trying to eliminate parking requirements downtown, working on our strategic plan. We set a law that we couldn't expand roads beyond three lanes in town because it was unnecessary and destructive. I was trying to limit a highway running through town — a central lane and two lanes going either way.
This was way before me — before you were working on those things. What was I saying at that point in time?
What's astounding — and I don't want to interrupt, keep going — is how you were working on these issues in parallel with, but not connected to, me working on them too. I was seeing our utilities and looking at the costs, trying to figure out how to contain them, looking at pipes, seeing where they were going. Sandpoint provides utilities for neighboring communities too, and when you go out to those communities, they have much less dense development patterns. The Walmart is the town next door. So you're looking at these pipes and going, boy, this is expensive to get water out there, and we have all these things coming due.
A city planner from a neighboring town actually said to me, 'I think you would really like this Strong Towns blog — you would really be into this.' I started reading and thought, you're right, I love this stuff. It was the information and the analysis that backed up a lot of things that I'd come to from a more gut-level point of view. A lot of this came from walking streets and going around town.
Sandpoint is a small town, maybe about 8,000 people now, but one of the first things I did was make sure I walked every single street we had inside the town — not just drive it, but actually walk it and try to understand what I was responsible for. When you do that, you start to have an appreciation for the specifics of everything. You start to see the built development pattern differently — how do things intersect, how do they work. I think that naturally led me to the same conclusions you found by doing the math. Having the math back up what I'd learned from that experience was even more powerful, because I could then articulate it to people.
Here's the concern. Here's what's going on. Here's why it's not working. Here's how this pattern is driving us broke as a city. Here's why we should be careful about impact fees. We had impact fees, which were a way to maximize revenue. But the problem was those impact fees also committed us to building more roads we couldn't afford, driving us deeper into debt. One of the things I did was knock down those impact fees, which made builders happy, made it easier to build housing — we were ahead of the curve on housing being unaffordable — and also reduced those long-term costs and kept us from making infrastructure commitments we couldn't afford.
That's kind of how it developed, and I definitely got a hands-on experience of Strong Towns ideas in those early days. The theory was immediately practical for me.
Yeah, so you and I met in what is one of the weirdest stories of early Strong Towns. In the very early days, I was going around giving talks in Minnesota, then I got invited to North Dakota, to Iowa, and pretty soon I was doing talks across the Midwest. Then I got this invitation out of the blue to go to Idaho and do a week-long road show across the state. I didn't know you, I didn't know your organization, I certainly did not know Idaho. What in the world were you thinking?
I feel like this is such a formative part of our relationship — and of Strong Towns' relationship with the movement. I'd love to hear the story in your words. Well, the year before I reached out to you, I had left North Idaho to go down to Boise and become the Executive Director of Conservation Voters for Idaho, where I stayed for three and a half years and helped grow that organization.
I had always loved this stuff. You didn't know me at all, but I listened to the podcast. That's how this happens — I knew you quite well. I'd heard the stories, you talked about things. The podcast back then was even more casual than it is now. I think I could watch a Curbside Chat you posted online. So I had a very clear sense of who you were and what you were about.
I really thought there was an opportunity to have a conversation in Idaho — whether in a liberal city like Boise, a conservative place like Salmon, or a mid-sized city like Lewiston somewhere in between — about what was happening with growth, and how to grow in a way that made sense. Looking at the financials would be something unifying across the different parts of Idaho politics, helping us have better conversations. That was the idea: let's get these conversations going. This was powerful and useful when I was a city council member, so surely it would be helpful to everyone else.
And I just really wanted to meet you. I'd listened to the podcasts and thought, I think Chuck and I are just going to be thick as thieves. That probably would have seemed a little delusional at the time, because you had no idea who I was. But I had a plan you weren't totally read into — you were going to come out to Idaho, and we were going to drive around the state together the entire week.
I think you thought I was just going to leave you in Boise, but you were like, no, let's do it everywhere. I was willing to rent a car, but you said, if you're going to do this with me, let's all ride together.
Fine, let's all ride in the car together. Andrew, our board chair now, came out for that trip too, and the three of us spent a week going around Idaho, stopping at all these places and talking about Strong Towns. The Curbside Chat was so new at that point — it was your initial talk.
They eventually became the Strong Towns book, but at that point the talk just told you how much trouble you were in. It was so raw, and it ended with, 'Hey, we are totally and completely screwed. Thanks everybody, I'm moving on to the next town.' People did not like that, in my experience. Some could accept it, some rejected it, but regardless, they found it very unsatisfying. So you and Andrew and I would spend these drives trying to brainstorm how to make people feel a little better.
We came up with eliminating parking requirements — that was one piece of advice you started giving people, and they felt a little better. Triage was the other thing — stop the bleeding. We literally showed people a med kit and said, you've got to do triage. I think that still didn't bring people the peace we thought it should; they still seemed quite alarmed. But by the end of that week, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
What I think about when I think about that week is — you're communicating something difficult and complex, getting feedback in real time, and Idaho is a big state, so we would spend hours in the car driving to the next place. We'd stop and have dinner. We'd stay up late and chat at the hotel. The whole time we were debating these ideas and trying to refine them and make them better. I imagine someone doing stand-up comedy, going on stage, and then having comedic experts around them who dissect every part of the set for four hours and then send them back up. By the end of that week, I felt like a superhero. I felt like this thing was 10x better than it was at the beginning of the week, because of all that time driving around with you and Andrew cutting it to shreds and making it better. That was a transformative week for me.
It's nice to hear. I think it's become part of how we do work at Strong Towns, too. Just a couple of weeks ago, we were down with a bunch of folks to talk about the Finance Decoder and figure out the next chapter of that — people from local conversations, professionals, elected officials, everyone just volunteering their time to help improve this tool. We couldn't convince people to drive around a state with us for five or six days, but we could get them to spend two days in windowless conference rooms.
As someone who came into this movement through that experience of just saying, 'I'm going to pay to get you out here and spend a week doing this' — it was so deeply fulfilling. I sometimes forget how amazing it is that we have a movement that's inspired people to donate their time like that. In fact, one of our participants said, 'Wow, Strong Towns is so generous — they give all these things out to the world, they write all these free tools.' You and I looked at each other and said, 'Whoa, whoa — people are coming back to us and bringing us things all the time.' That's what's made Strong Towns what it is today: how many people have shown up and brought things without asking anything in return.
I can't remember exactly when you moved to Seattle.
It was the fall of 2014 when we asked you to join the board. I'll give a little background: Strong Towns started as a Minnesota-based nonprofit. The two people originally on the board with me were people I had done professional work with here in Minnesota, but the organization had grown very quickly beyond that. My coming out to Idaho, then doing similar things in California and Pennsylvania, affirmed that we were a different organization than just a Minnesota-based one.
In the fall of 2014 we had a big gathering, brought people to Minneapolis, and our original board said, 'Okay, we'll step back — if you're going to focus on a more national message, give us names of people you'd want on the board.' Andrew Burleson, who I'd met through CNU, and Ian Rasmussen, who I'd also met through CNU, both agreed. You were there in Minneapolis and we asked you, and you said yes. Talk about when you went to Seattle, and where Strong Towns was in your life story when you joined the board in 2014.
I was still the Executive Director of Conservation Voters for Idaho, and then my wife was going to law school at the University of Washington. She started in the fall of 2015, so we moved out at the end of July. I took a job with the National League of Conservation Voters — that's where I was coming from when I came to Strong Towns.
Strong Towns was happening right then. Our first strategic planning was in June or July of 2015. We had our first board meeting with the new board in December of 2014 — that was right after Destiny Gonzalez was killed in Springfield — and I remember the vibe at that meeting was, okay, we're a brand new board, what's our plan?
We kicked off the conversation in December of 2014, then did the actual plan in June. I think we came to that meeting and said we should have a plan, and you said, 'I don't know if we need a plan.' We were like, 'No, it would really be good to have a plan.' You said, 'I don't know, things seem to be working.' We said, 'We're going to create a plan.' Then you said, 'Okay, but if we're going to create a plan, you all have to come hang out with me in Brainerd, near a lake.' You hadn't yet figured out you could convince us to go to Disney World. That was in June, and then the next month I moved to Seattle. It all sort of happened at once.
It really was a moment of both profound change in my life and a big change in Strong Towns' life. I facilitated that meeting, though Andrew had the starring moment where he came up with the exercise that helped us sort things out — credit where it's due. I was smart enough to step aside — that's core facilitation, just going, 'I think you've got it, let's do that thing.'
We really emerged from that with a plan that got us focused on the theory of change that has carried us almost all the way to where we are now. The core idea was that there are things we do extraordinarily well, and we're going to focus on those. At the time it was giving talks and publishing content — putting information out into the world. We understood that at its heart this is a media organization, and in many ways this podcast exemplified that. That heart has persevered over the last decade, but we've also grown a bit more than that — it's also become a movement. People started responding to the content and started doing stuff, acting in their local communities and coming back to us saying, 'Hey, we could use some help.' That's changed who we are over the last decade too.
I want people to have an understanding of what our collaboration is like. My wife, at times, has said, 'You talk to John more than to me.' I feel like I get a lot of credit for being this visionary person who's built this organization, and I try to take every opportunity I can to say that it's a team of people who have been thinking through this together.
There was a period of time between 2015, when we adopted the first plan, to when we went through the whole implementation of it — adding staff, working on things as minute as how do we make our email system work better, how do we do Facebook ads better. Then we get to the 2020-2021 phase where we update our plan to focus on getting stuff done on the ground, and I feel like we're in another transition now where we're going to update our plan again and really talk about impact.
None of that happens with just me coming to a board and presenting ideas. There's been this ongoing thick dialog. I'd like the people listening to this to understand that this is something I have done with you, kind of hand in hand, for 12 or 14 years now, and something we have done with Andrew and with Ian — the four of us have had central roles in making this happen. You've been behind the scenes. I'd like you to describe our relationship since 2014, and how that has been part of shaping what we've done, because there have been a lot of times where I've said, 'I think we should do this,' and you've said, 'I think we should do that,' and we've gone back and forth. I feel like every one of those tensions has made us come to a better place and made this organization a lot stronger.
Well, I really appreciate that, and I think about it in similar ways. One of the things I've been thinking about is that people will say, 'Oh, you're taking over as Executive Director of Strong Towns, you're in charge now' — and none of that bothers me — but to me that's not really the right frame. I'm coming to Strong Towns to work with you, not to replace you.
Collaboration — you'll talk about us having two-hour conversations, but I think it became clear to both of us over the years that to do the things we wanted to do together, we needed to be in conversation on a daily basis. It's quite a privilege to leave a job you love to come to another job you love. I just recognized that the collaboration we have together — I could not do it at the level I wanted without actually joining you inside the organization. That's the key of this whole moment.
I have tremendous respect and admiration for our current staff and the people who have worked with us over the years, and for our local conversations. Our collaboration is just one of many things at the core of why this organization and movement is what it is. What makes Strong Towns special is that it exists in conversation with other people, in conversation with community. These ideas aren't entirely unique — I was working on repealing parking requirements long before I met you — but the true brilliance comes from integrating ideas and insights from folks all over the country and inviting them in. For someone like me, who was happy to just call you up and say, 'Hey, we should be collaborators,' you were someone ready to take that call.
I feel like the superpower I've been able to build is that I've spoken about Strong Towns in all 50 states. When I go there, I'm not being brought to the tourist destinations — I'm being brought to neighborhoods by people who live there, and they talk about the issues. It gives me profound insight. I get home from a trip and call you, and I'm saying, 'John, I was in this space where I didn't know what I was doing. These people showed up, I had no idea if I could connect with them, and then all of a sudden they're talking my language.'
There's been this evolution of me that has occurred in conversation and dialog with you over the years. I'll give you a prime example. I remember the first time I went to Shreveport and they brought me to the Allendale neighborhood. I remember feeling very out of my element — not only because of a racial divide I just wasn't used to, but here were people saying things that on paper I thought were crazy. The federal government was running a highway through the middle of their neighborhood and they were trying to oppose it. I thought I was in an alternate reality.
Listening to them, talking it through, and then coming back to you — and having you say, 'Yeah, there's something here, dig into it, this is an important dialog' — that built up into some of my best friendships in this movement. You've long been the person who, when everybody has their own imposter syndrome, has said, 'Go do it. This is where you're meant to be.'
I think the key, as you pointed out, is that I just don't care about your health that much. I just want the ideas to spread. A lot of it is ground-truthing with you — taking these big moments, these big ideas, these new strategies, and checking them against what the best practice advice might be. I've brought with me someone who's been an executive director, who's worked with executive directors across the country and helped them think through problems. I sort of have this encyclopedia of what's best practice here.
What's been fun about working together is figuring out when we should depart from best practice — when we should not do the thing everyone else is doing, when we should zig while others zag. That's what's been so powerful: creating a new playbook together at the same time, figuring out when to double down on basic organizational development practice and when we can actually do this a different way.
Can we talk about LCV?
Sure. I feel like you've been a coach for me in a lot of ways. I remember once when we were driving somewhere — you always have a phone in your hand — you got a call from the executive director of some nonprofit from I don't know where, trying to run a campaign, and you're trying to help them figure this and that out. Ten minutes later, you get another call from someone in another state working on something else. What marveled me about your time at LCV is that you were, in a sense, a coach for people doing the kind of work I was doing — and you were coaching me at the same time I was watching you coach other people.
Can you describe what you were doing at LCV, why it mattered to you, and how it prepared you for what we're going to be working on together?
Well, I worked in a lot of different programs at LCV over the years. I was there for 11 years and moved around and did a variety of things. I was hired to work on local policy and also on bipartisanship — figuring out how to make the environment a bipartisan issue. Eventually I ended up running a federal campaign that we only got Democrats to vote for, so I did the whole gamut. I still certainly think there's a need and a pathway to making these issues reach across party lines and have a big tent — for durability, we have to get there.
But when people ask me what I do, even now as I'm leaving, they say, 'So what do you actually do?' What I do mostly is talk on the phone with people. Some of them work for me and most of them don't. I help people think through their problems — how they solve them — and part of that is running campaigns to pass policy or elect people, and part of that is how do you run an organization. I worked with executives of our affiliate organizations and partners in the states, trying to support them in doing that work.
Frankly, it's an incredible education. The conservation voter movement — LCV and the 30-plus state affiliates — is just filled with brilliant, smart, clever, passionate, hardworking people I deeply admire. You learn things all the time when you're doing that work. It's easy to seem smart when you learn from smart people all the time and just take the best ideas to the next spot. People say, 'Wow, you know so much,' and I think, yeah, because I got to talk to five more people like you today.
You get to see how people are solving their problems in organizations, take that to scale, find common problems, and find common solutions. A lot of it is just asking questions. I learned a lot from you over the years and was able to take those things and share them with others too.
I think what's powerful at Strong Towns — and we have a very distinctly different culture, mission, and approach, none of which we're going to change — is that you see the culture of a movement matter. Sometimes people ask, 'Oh, you came from a big political organization — is Strong Towns going to start a PAC?' No, we're not. Are we going to start doing elections? No, we're not. That's not our theory of change and not our approach. I've been around the whole time we've been doing the Strong Towns work, and I've been the voice most strongly saying, 'We've got our thing — we're going to keep doing it that way.'
But to come back to your question: what makes that movement so powerful is the culture. Those groups of organizations and people, when they come together, add up to more than the sum of their parts. It actually multiplies the impact — the sharing of ideas and a culture that pushes everyone to do their work a little better.
When I look at Strong Towns and think about what's next for us, I think about our local conversations, which are our version of affiliates across the country. Our next step in this chapter is: how do we help connect them to each other? How do we make sure the great ideas happening in one place get extended to other places? Increasingly, I think the most powerful ideas to make change are coming out of our local conversations, and our role is to help sharpen those and then share them across the movement and create this shared movement culture. We have amazing people doing amazing things in amazing places, and when we get them together, things become more than the sum of their parts.
You're on my podcast. I'm always friendly to guests; I always try to put you in a position to look good. But I want to ask you a couple of tough questions. You just brought up local conversations, and I have it as one of the things I wanted to ask you about.
Now I feel like we're going to have a little fight on the podcast. This will be good. I've said we should have more arguments — I think they help bring in audience.
One of the biggest sources of tension we've had over the years was how we dealt with — early on we were just saying theoretically — the idea of local chapters. When we put together our first strategic plan, one of the ideas up on the wall was 'start local chapters,' and that idea was soundly rejected by everybody, led by you. 'We should never, ever do this — bad idea.' Of all the board members, you were probably the last one on board with local conversations. In fact, I'm watching this program grow, because we didn't start it — it just started on its own — and I have to go to the board and get out in front of it. You were the one I was always most worried about, because you were very vocal: 'I don't know if this is the path we want to take.'
The board is 100% on board now — you, Andrew, Ian, Lavette, Greg — the whole board loves the local conversations. Can you talk about that shift? What were your concerns that are now alleviated? How has your thinking evolved?
Or maybe you were always right. That's also a possibility. Well, I will say that your concerns early on shaped how we tried to form this aspect of what we do. I think we were not ready for local conversations at that first conversation. We all realized that — we weren't organizers, we didn't know how to do it. The ideas then were like, we'll go out there and try to get people to start doing this stuff. We were not well suited to that, because of the tremendous amount of resources it takes to pick a place and purposely have something happen.
So instead, our strategy was to inspire people to take action, not worry too much about where they take action, and just try to generate action all over the place. Then what happened, as you correctly point out, is people started organizing communities — coming together and actually going out and doing Strong Towns ideas. That didn't bother me. What gave me a little hiccup is they started calling themselves 'Strong Towns Whatever' or 'the Strong Towns group for this area,' and that's where I said, 'Gosh, now we have a responsibility if they're going to have our name on it.' Because now people are out there — how do we know they're going to promote Strong Towns ideas? What if they promote other ideas? What if we have a Strong Towns conversation out there supporting the expansion of roads?
That definitely made me go, 'Oh gosh, I feel a little queasy about this.' It wasn't a theoretical exercise — we actually had ones where they said, 'We're against this duplex development next door,' and I said, 'Whoa, hang on a second.' That made me really anxious, and it also made it clear that we couldn't avoid responsibility. People were going to go out there and do things based on what we were putting out into the world. We had a choice to either ignore it and let them do whatever they did, or to engage with them and help sharpen it and create a common approach. The better choice was clearly to try to figure out how to create that common approach.
What makes our local conversations so powerful is that they naturally emerge. None of them exist because we initiated them. All of them exist because local people looked around and said, 'We want to take action to build a strong town.' That's why they've been so powerful. We're not going to start pushing local conversations out into the world and saying, 'We need one here or here,' but what we are doing is providing a lot more support and figuring out how to connect people together. I think that's necessary and wise.
We're bigger now, and this is stretching us. They are moving fast and asking more from us. Right now we're really struggling with questions about state preemption — where do the laws work well, where don't they? A lot of that comes from the need of our local conversations, who are saying, 'We're seeing state policies and we think we need some of these to help our towns.' We even have city council members saying, 'I'd like this preemption bill in this case, but not in these cases.' That's pushing us to embrace and think about those issues faster than we're ready to, frankly. We need more time to work out the framework.
Local conversations, I think, are our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity right now. I've changed my mind not about how much of a challenge they are, but about how big of an opportunity they are.
Yes. Just at the Finance Decoder Summit, there were obviously lots of brilliant people in the room, but the people who really moved me were the two from local conversations. They were my favorite too.
When you do this Johnny Appleseed approach — just spreading seeds and seeing what grows — what grows is often incredible, stuff you would never have come up with yourself. The most blown away I was came when Sean, at the end, put up his little toggle thing showing the net financial position, and then what it looks like with infrastructure liabilities added in. It blew my mind, because I had literally looked at that problem for five years thinking, 'How do I express this in a way that is simple enough to carry the day, but factual enough not to be torn down by critics?' And he did it in three hours.
He set it up with a team, with a group of people — with elected officials and others coming together to figure it out collectively. I think the power of that was that it was one of the instances where I saw someone using AI in a way that collapsed around collaboration rather than becoming more isolating. I always think, 'Oh, AI is driving us apart, we're all going to be on our little screens.' So it was cool to see people using tech in a way that actually brought them together.
The people in our local conversations are incredible. They are doing incredible things to improve their local communities, and they are asking for our help. One of my commitments coming into this role is that I want to make sure every day I'm thinking about how I can, as Executive Director of Strong Towns, show up for them and make sure we as a team are showing up for them in ways that help them do this work. They are the heroes of our movement. This was the dream — that they would exist — and they exist in ways that were unimaginable to me.
Even the ones that aren't formally local conversations — I think about New Zealand redoing their transportation plan and integrating Strong Towns ideas. To me that's a local conversation. Anyone who's taking the ideas and putting them into action, whether you have a group or you're just engaging with the site, is part of our conversation at Strong Towns. It has to happen locally to matter. That's why I'm coming into this organization at this time — to partner with them.
I want to ask you about this, because I feel like I've been recruiting you to be Executive Director for about 10 years now, and it was never the right time, for a whole bunch of reasons. In the last couple of years, the board has pushed me to mature the leadership side of our organization — our strategic plan says we need to do this, and I'm on board. We brought in Carly as a Chief of Staff and have been thickening up the organization. When we had our retreat at the beginning of the year, we agreed we were going to seek out someone in this kind of position.
You were leading that effort. You were helping with names, you got us connected to people, we interviewed some dynamic and wonderful candidates, we made one job offer that was very serious. Then I feel like we had this Dick Cheney moment — George W. Bush asked Cheney to go find him the best vice presidential candidate he could, and then Cheney came back after a long, exhaustive search and said, 'I found the right person. It's me.' You called me when I got back from the UK. We'd had our offer rejected and I was frustrated, and you said to me, 'I think I'm ready to do this job.' Why now?
We weren't actually advertising the exact structure of the job I'm taking. But why is now the time? The transparent answer is: I could not have the impact in this movement and in this organization that I wanted to from the board anymore.
We could not collaborate the way that I wanted to collaborate with me not being here every day. I had to make a choice: am I going to miss out on this moment, am I going to miss out on this opportunity, am I not going to get to do this thing that I care about so deeply? I realized I started having jealousy of the candidates for this job — a role that's actually smaller than the one I'm taking now. I started going, 'This is the thing, this is where the action is, we've got to do this stuff.' This is an incredible moment in this organization I care about, and I was thinking, why am I not going there?
This is the work that, if I'm feeling this sense of FOMO about, I need to think about that pretty seriously. I realized it, and frankly the organization's gotten bigger and I've gotten busy too. You and I have had fewer of those two-hour conversations than we used to, because you've had more to do and I've had more work on my end, and then the details matter a lot more — it took longer when we did have conversations for me to be useful to you, because the organization was bigger and more complex. I try not to shoot from the hip; I'm someone who wants to actually understand the context so I can give good advice.
I don't think those conversations were useless — I think I was still providing value — but I wasn't engaging at the level of depth that I wanted to. I felt like I had more to contribute. I felt like there was more I could show up to do, and that I could help us solve some of the core problems we face as an organization and movement right now. I don't want to miss this part. Some of the most exciting work we've ever done at Strong Towns, I think, is going to happen over the next couple of years.
That's why — as I tell people — we are on the verge of breakthroughs in how we work, in what we work on, and in the kinds of tools and support we can provide people. Some of the geography of where we might be able to go and make an impact — we are just at this point of transformation, another breakthrough moment. I want to be here for every minute of it. I want to wake up every morning getting to think about this stuff and work with you and our team and our board and people across the country to make it happen.
I'm similarly excited. People ask me to explain what I do and I say, I don't know, I'm trying to change the world, and I wake up every morning jazzed about it.
I know you've had a chance to meet with the team, and you're certainly not unfamiliar to them. Our board — unlike many nonprofits I've encountered — is actually involved. Andrew and Lavette were at the national gathering and sat in on our team meeting. The team is certainly familiar with you as a person, not as intimately as they will be, but they know who you are. I think the big question people listening will have is: what's going to be different? If you look at where we are today or how people perceive Strong Towns — what do you think is going to be different six months from now, 12 months from now, with you coming in?
I don't know that we'll be nicer — that's a good question. Maybe nicer than you, Chuck. The team thinks you're nicer. We'll rejoin X and write nice posts now instead of getting into it with people. I think we're going to stay off of Twitter, but we'll have that discussion.
I don't know exactly what's going to change, and I said this to the team: my approach is to come in and listen. I'm very interested in hearing from the people listening to this now, along with our team, our board, our local conversations, and our partner organizations around the country. So I'm going to learn a lot. The organization and movement is so much bigger now — I actually have a lot to listen and learn during this time.
But I will give an answer to your question — I won't dodge it entirely. What I hope, if you ask what's going to change over time, is that Strong Towns feels more itself. I came to Strong Towns back in 2008, 2009. I was attracted to the original DNA of this organization and to these ideas, and I've watched this journey. I love our evolution, and I think our best choices have been the ones that make us even more who we are — more of a bottom-up movement, more grounded in the math and thinking about communities, more human-scale, with a team that has a strong community and is tapping into people's expertise, willing to grow and evolve, but with that focus still on 'do what you can to build a strong town.'
After one of those talks I used to give, someone said to me, 'Oh, you're just like Chuck, only with more jokes.' Less doom and gloom, more jokes. That was the nicest compliment I ever got for plagiarized work. I kind of had something there — I added jokes, but otherwise just the math. I guess what I would say is it's going to be Strong Towns still, but with more of it. There's going to be more Strong Towns.
That's what people can expect: more content, more connection, more growth. We're going to be the same, but more. It's going to grow in an incremental way, step by step, because how else could this organization grow?
Let me share something with you, because I give a State of the Strong Towns address every year at our annual team retreat — just me summarizing where I feel like we're at, where we've done well, where we haven't. This has been one of my slides for the last couple of years, and it's a quote of yours: 'Our management is not up to the astounding level of our culture and complexity.' You said that at a board meeting once.
When you say management, what we're really talking about is the connective tissue that allows who we are to flow through the organization. There are many examples, but we'll publish something and it will be right, but it will be not quite authentically right in the way it would be if I wrote it myself. How do you convey that? It is tough to bring someone in and have them embody who we are and be able to express that.
The thing I'm most excited about with you is that I don't need to take six months or even six minutes to translate the vision to you. You've co-made the vision with me. The connective tissue is not something we have to build to make this work — it's something you're essentially here to provide from day one.
I hope that's the case. I see you're being so transparent — you're like, 'John, you've critiqued our management over the years. Do you think you'll help improve it?'
The answer is, I hope to be a good force in the organization and help us solve the problems we have. I said this to you privately and I'm going to say it publicly too: I think Strong Towns is one of the most incredible, powerful, world-changing organizations that exists. Do I think there are some areas for us to improve, some internal systems that could be better, and that having someone with some management experience will help? Yeah, I think that will help.
But this is really about doubling down on what we do, not coming in and saying, 'Oh my gosh, it's a mess.' Everything's not perfect, but this is not a dumpster fire I'm running to put out. This is like a cool small city that's growing and having a massive influx of new residents come in, and we're trying to figure out how to accommodate them. That's the growing pains of a successful organization. I hope to help us figure out how to be successful in the face of the overwhelming enthusiasm for these ideas that you've led on over the years. That's a real challenge — to deal with that kind of growth and excitement.
We'll see, because we will be adding some new members to the board at some point, and maybe two years from now I'll have a quote from them about our management not being up to these standards.
I figure every year you and I are going to come on here, and you're just going to give me a review of how things are going. Chuck and John will come on, and Chuck will say, 'Here are some things, John, you said in our first interview you would solve, and I'm not seeing it.' That'll be our annual assessment.
We could do that.
Let me end with this, because I do think this will be different. The one thing podcast listeners will notice is that you and I will do a lot more of this. Our best podcasts have been discussions where we delve into issues and talk things through. You and I aren't afraid to disagree, and I think we have a really good way of talking through issues together. I'm looking forward to having you not only on this podcast more often — because you're going to be here and available — but also on Upzoned, and the Bottom-Up Shorts, and the other podcasts and videos we do. Your voice is going to go from being in the background here to appearing more and more in the content stream, and I think we'll all benefit from that. So, welcome.
I'm excited to engage in the conversation even more. What is Strong Towns but an ongoing conversation? The conversations you and I have had over the years, the conversations we've had as a board, your conversations with people all over the country, our local conversations — I am so thrilled to be spending my time, my life, with you and the rest of this community, just continuing this conversation. Let's do it.
John Reuter, Executive Director of Strong Towns. You're going to start July 1, so don't start inundating John quite yet, but we're going to get him in. The first thing he's going to do is spend a couple of days hanging out with me, and then we'll roll up our sleeves. Then I'll start answering your emails right after that.
That's right.
Next thing. Cool. Thanks everybody. Thanks, John. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care, everybody.
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.