Mary Kate Norton, Strong Towns’ Mobilization Coordinator and Trainer, came to advocacy through other people’s stories: campus workers juggling multiple jobs, family members stuck without safe transportation options, and neighbors trying to find housing they could afford. Those experiences shaped how she sees local change now: as something rooted in attention, trust, and the willingness to let a place tell you what it needs. In this episode, Mary Kate reflects on how personal stories become public work, why successful local groups begin by listening, and how advocates can build movements that fit their own communities instead of copying someone else’s model.
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens. I'm joined today by a special guest, someone who is part of the Strong Towns team and who is playing a really important role in helping individuals working on the ground make their towns stronger places. She has a lot of experience and insight into what it takes to advocate for change at a local level, and I'm looking forward to capturing some of those insights in today's conversation.
Mary Kate Norton is the mobilization coordinator and trainer at Strong Towns, where she brings years of experience in grassroots organizing, leadership development, and coalition building to support local advocates in building powerful, durable movements for change. Mary Kate, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I am really looking forward to talking with you and hearing more of your story.
Thanks so much for having me.
Maybe to start things off, you could tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your professional background, and how you found out about Strong Towns. What was that journey like?
Absolutely. I came to Strong Towns from a background in grassroots community organizing, so I was doing a lot of housing advocacy, coalition building, and justice-centered things in my home state of Kentucky. I found Strong Towns through my husband, who watches a lot of Not Just Bikes and is an urbanist nerd. He was like, 'Hey, I think you should check out these Strong Towns videos.' Of course, I went down the rabbit hole, as many of us do.
It connected a lot of dots for me between the advocacy work that I was doing around housing, transit, other issues of inequality, placemaking in my town, and the built environment. I came to Strong Towns from that background, and it's been an awesome time.
Tell us a little bit more about your hometown. I'd love to hear more about how you got into this. I'm going back even another step: how did you get into advocacy work at all? What were you seeing? What inspired you? What did that work look like?
I grew up outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, and then did a lot of advocacy work in Lexington, Kentucky, all in the Midwest. I got into advocacy in college by accident. I was looking to make friends. In my first couple weeks, people were meeting, and of course all the clubs were trying to recruit everyone. One of the places where I really found a lot of community and connection was in an advocacy group working to raise wages on the college campus.
In hearing the stories of folks who worked in dining, custodial services, and grounds, and realizing that those folks who were critical to the experience I was having as a college student were often working two and even three full-time jobs to make ends meet at this liberal arts college that had such lofty ideas and ideals, it really pushed me into advocacy.
That became environmental advocacy, housing advocacy, transit advocacy, and mental health advocacy. It's looked different ways, but that initial spark for me was people's stories, hearing other people's experiences, and connecting them to my own and my family's experiences.
Can you talk a little bit more about what the housing and transit side of that looked like? Were you working in Cincinnati? I love Cincinnati. I don't know if you were at the National Gathering in Cincinnati. I love that city. I got there and thought, 'Wait, what?' It's such a little flyover. It's got so much of the right stuff. How has no one talked about this city before?
Then there was the cute little bridge. I went to school and lived in New York City for a while, so the little model Brooklyn Bridge, and they were like, 'Yeah, the same guy who designed that designed this.' I was like, 'What? Worlds colliding.' It was awesome.
One of the things I did notice was the transportation. I'm curious where your thoughts are on transportation, because that was one of the things I had noticed. I was thinking, 'They're doing a lot great. I still feel like a little bit of the transit side needed some work.' I would love to hear what you've seen, what you've been working on, and how you frame that challenge.
I haven't done transit advocacy in Cincinnati. I've done it in Lexington, Kentucky, and other places. Part of what pushed me into thinking about transit and safe infrastructure for folks who aren't in a car was working with some of my family members who have had different health things that kept them from driving at different points in their lives.
I remember my sister coming home from college. She had moved into an apartment, and she was stuck. There was no way out of her block without a car that felt safe to her. There were no roads that felt safe to cross, and the infrastructure just wasn't there. If she needed to get somewhere, my mom was going to drive her, I was going to drive her, somebody had to be involved.
That lack of independence is really harsh. That's a hard place to be. I think Cincinnati still has a really long way to go in terms of connectivity and the safety of folks who are not in a car trying to move around and get their daily lives done.
All right. I'll keep myself from nerding out about Cincinnati and transportation, and I want to ask you now to tell us a little bit more about your role at Strong Towns. What do you do? How do you like to describe it?
I do all things local conversations. My title is mobilization coordinator and trainer, and that translates to supporting the 267 local conversations, as we're recording this, in the advocacy, the grassroots work, and the really bottom-up change that they're doing in their communities.
We have all these lofty ideas and great frameworks at Strong Towns, along with really good toolkits and information. How that translates to a local context looks so different in Kentucky, Minnesota, where I am now based, or anywhere in the world. My job is to help local advocates translate and be effective on the ground. I do a lot of coaching, Zoom trainings, and relationship building, because we only build strong towns if we build them together.
I can imagine in your role that it's tricky because, as you said, you're trying to help people translate all this information into something very specific for their context. I'm curious how you frame that work. That might be a tricky question, but I'm curious: is it a lot of listening and then helping them find the entry point that makes the most sense for their community? Is it finding the right types of stories to tell for their community or helping them think about the relationships they need to build first?
Do you have a modality for how you frame that work? How do we bring these ideas to be living truths in the communities where we live, knowing that all 267 of them are going to be different? I feel like that's a really big challenge, but I'm sure it can be really inspiring at the same time.
That's the fun part: all 267 are doing such different things in such different contexts. I think my role, and the role of the local conversation leader, most basically, is to be a listener. I do very little sharing of Strong Towns ideas, and I do a lot of asking, 'What's it like to live on your block? What about these other folks from your group who live three streets away? What's it like for them? When you have thought about biking to work, what keeps you from biking to work?'
It's all listening and then making connections, because the people across town who are struggling to bike to work have a lot of overlap and commonality with the people who may live more in the inner city and are struggling to pay their rent. A lot of that is the same story, and there's a lot of overlap there.
Strong Towns is often a place where people can come from very disparate ideas, backgrounds, stories, and parts of the community, but find commonality in the Strong Towns goals and the Strong Towns approach as well.
I feel like that's the answer I was looking for but didn't know I was listening for. I think you're right that it really does boil down to storytelling. It's the story of your town, the story of your challenge, and how Strong Towns fits into that story. How does Strong Towns become a space where you can all tell your story, and it comes together and makes sense?
I feel like that's a powerful way of framing it, because that allows people who might be coming from different backgrounds, experiences, or values to find common ground if they can find a way to tell a story together, both of where they are, where they're struggling, and where they want to go.
Absolutely.
Backing up a little bit, you mentioned that you work with the local conversation groups. For someone listening to this who doesn't really know what a local conversation group is, can you explain that? Maybe you can tell us a little bit of the backstory as to how these got started. You already told us how many there are, but how do you like to describe local conversations to folks who don't know?
Most basically, a local conversation is a group of people in a particular place coming together around the Strong Towns approach and then putting it into action where they live. That's a really vague definition, and it's vague on purpose, because it allows for all of the differences in place and personality that come with local conversations.
The groups that have sprung up in Chicago and Albuquerque are doing totally different things than groups in small-town Kentucky or out in San Diego. All of the local conversations have a couple things in common. They're a group of people that started up organically and are sharing a vision that their town can be stronger, their town should be stronger, and they're going to work toward it together.
People work on transit advocacy, yes, but mostly safe streets, incremental housing, and bus benches. I stepped into the local conversation program in December. It came about almost accidentally. Strong Towns was putting out all this great information, resources, and support, and these groups started coming up organically a couple years back.
As these groups started popping up organically and calling themselves Strong Towns groups, Strong Towns National, as an organization, noticed and said, 'Hey, this is incredible. We should build out some support and offer resources and help to these groups doing the bottom-up change, doing the real work of going curb by curb to paint and daylight the curbs.'
I stepped in to grow the program and really support all these advocates who came together organically and now have, hopefully through Strong Towns, a lot more resources and support to realize the visions that they have for their places.
It's funny. I feel like Strong Towns is the ultimate bottom-up revolution. It was so fun how the way they were putting the content out really inspired this approach to local change that's so consistent with the Strong Towns approach to change, without Strong Towns even trying. It's so meta when you think about it on so many levels.
You've told us how many groups there are. Do you know how many members there are, how many active citizens or how many people are participating in the local conversation groups? I'm curious. I realize we might not be really strict about numbers. I don't know. You probably don't.
No, I don't. That's such a good question. About half of the 260-some are in the early stages, so they're groups of four, five, or six people getting started, doing the work, maybe reading one of Chuck's books, maybe doing a bus bench or two and daylighting a couple of curbs, and making a couple of public comments.
They're just getting started, and then about half are growing, with 10, 20, or 150 people doing bigger and bigger advocacy projects. I don't have a number, but it is a good question to ask. Now I want to know too.
What are some of the stories you've been hearing? Do you notice anything interesting, or has anything really stood out to you about what's resonating with people as to why they're starting these groups, the vision they have for their towns, or the challenges they're running into? Have you noticed any patterns that emerge repeatedly in those areas?
Absolutely. Across the board, people have personal stories and reasons why they're getting involved. It's often an experience they've had or something they've seen a loved one or family member experience. In my case, it's the experience of trying to find housing as a millennial and not being able to find a place I can afford in the neighborhoods where I want to be.
Other people talk about housing a lot, or they have young kids who want to bike to school, and there's not a safe way for their kids to bike to school, so they get involved for that. There are a lot of similar stories, all of them coming from a place of, 'This is a personal thing that happened.'
There are also a lot of folks who come from within local government and have the experience of having a vision for their city, things they want to do, and things they know they can do, but feel a lot of frustration about the slow pace of local government work. They want to have more support, advocacy, and shared goals with the community. Strong Towns offers a lot of place for connection from local government to the community and from the community back to local government.
As I'm listening to you explain that, one thing that comes to mind is this idea that caring about the public realm is really natural to what it means to be a human being. I feel like Strong Towns local conversation groups give people an outlet for something that's pretty normal, but has kind of been scrubbed out of our culture. This idea of being an engaged citizen, caring about the public place, showing up to meetings, volunteering, that sort of thing.
I think some researchers would call it an associative culture, a culture of public care. I think it's faded in recent generations, and it's so interesting to see how the local conversation groups provide a space for something that I think is fundamental to being a human being: caring for the public, not just the private. To see people resonate with that and step into that space and that challenge is really neat.
I think it's sad, but it's also really challenging. It should challenge us to reevaluate our expectations for what we think it means to be a citizen of a place. Maybe there's something right about not just consuming or residing, but also contributing and caring. Every time I have a person on the show who's doing something remarkable, or even just small and ordinary in their town, it's another reminder that this is actually normal. This is the way things should be. We should be showing up and caring.
Yes. One of the things that I think is magic about the local conversation program is that the vast majority are started by people who don't have a background in city planning. They're not engineers. They're not in local government. They have no background in this. They're just a neighbor who noticed something and said, 'Hey, let's get together and do something about this.'
I was on a panel this morning at the Strong Towns National Gathering with four local conversation leaders from different places across the U.S., and each of them had completely different stories for how their group got started and what it looks like now. One of the commonalities was that nobody on those teams started out as an expert in anything related to organizing, city planning, or any of it. They just came with their observations and their belief that their city could be better.
From your experiences, looking back over even the past few months with Strong Towns, but also your experience before that, have you noticed any best practices for advocating well in your community? I'm curious if one or two come to mind that you would share with our audience.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is focus on your people. The groups that are successful in having an impact over the long term are the ones that have a community of people acting together.
It's really easy to be one or three people who shout into the void, who come to city council meetings and participate in all these aspects of civic life and get really frustrated and burnt out, because as one person, your voice often isn't that loud in our communities.
The best practice that I've seen work time and time again is bringing in more voices and amplifying your message that way. Not just voices that have already watched everything there is to watch in the Strong Towns backlog on YouTube, but voices that have different perspectives and can speak to different areas in your community, different stories, and even different cultures. Bringing in that diversity of voices means that your message and your people power can be louder.
Beyond that, there are a lot of best practices around how to do it and how to pick something specific to work on, such as which curb you're going to focus on first. But it all boils down to the people you've got on your team and bringing in more and more people so that you can do more and more good things.
I can imagine that another part of the adventure of building an effective advocacy group has a lot to do with finding your people, and then creating a vision that people can get excited about. This is one thing I've always wondered about Strong Towns: how do you navigate that tension where you have all these people in the room, and they might all think that for their town to be strong, they need to do this one thing, or this is what it looks like to have a strong town?
They might all have a different answer to that question, and yet somehow you have to channel that energy in a unified way toward some specific direction. How do you think through that challenge?
That is such a challenge, because everybody does have a slightly different or completely different vision. I'll share a story that Alex Montero from Strong Towns Chicago shared this morning. They started their local conversation and had all these great ideas about Strong Towns, but they were really intentional at the beginning, a few years back, about listening.
Anybody who came to their meeting shared what their concerns were, what their thoughts were, and what they thought the local conversation should do, become, and focus on. From there, they identified four key areas and said, 'Okay, these four areas are the ones that everybody is talking about. They're talking about them in slightly different ways or from different angles, but these are the buckets of things that people are talking about.'
That's what they focus on. It's on the back of their T-shirts, it's on their business cards, and it's on their website, because that's what the stories and concerns pointed them toward. The people who started the local conversation didn't necessarily have those four things picked out. Those four things emerged because, as a group, they were really good at listening.
Something that Strong Towns PDX in Portland, Oregon, does really well, as do many others, is having a step-up, step-back model. Meaning, if you've got an idea and what you want to do is daylight intersections, you come in and say, 'I've got to daylight this intersection.' The local conversation says, 'Awesome. How can we support you?' Then you lead on that effort.
It becomes a group that's not coming to each other saying, 'Somebody should do something about that.' It becomes a group where you come in and say, 'I want to do this thing,' and then the group figures out how to support you in that initiative.
I've had so many different people on from different local conversation groups, including PDX and Chicago. There are a couple other ones that I know I've had on, so sorry for not giving a shout-out, but it is so interesting to me how they all come up with a different model. I remember San Antonio, and maybe PDX too, saying, 'This group does that. This working group does this here.' It's fascinating.
I think it really does exemplify the answer to our cities. In some ways, it captures the problem and the solution at the same time, because the problem is that top-down, one-size-fits-all doesn't work for building human ecosystems that are thriving, flourishing, and adaptable. This is the story of American urbanism, where it's going to be one guidebook for every community, one guidebook for the roads, one guidebook for the design, one guidebook for the housing, one guidebook for everything.
That works great if you're thinking about cities primarily as economic engines, because it creates stability. It creates a certain kind of stability and certainty. It gets rid of some levels of risk. It's neater if you're one of those urbanists who likes neat places. But that's what's got us in this mess. So what's the way out of it?
It really is letting communities be their own communities and figure out what works for them. You have governing principles and a general direction of where you need to go, but you don't have this one-size-fits-all guidebook to govern everything in this town. It's so cool to see how every conversation group has figured out a way to be consistent with the Strong Towns ideas, yet diverse in how they practice them and implement them in their town. It's really interesting to me.
Everybody does things so differently, and yet there are so many commonalities in the ways that they're able to start transforming their communities.
What do you think is the future of the local conversations group? You mentioned wanting to see more get off the ground, and I know part of your role is helping grow them. What is the vision? What kind of vision do you have for these groups?
I hope groups continue to figure out what works in their community and do it with more and more people. I look at groups like Strong Towns ABQ in Albuquerque, Spokane Reimagined, and so many of these other groups that are doing great things, and I think the short-term vision is more bus benches and more active transit options.
But the long-term vision is more people. It's more people working together. As I said, about half the local conversations are in those beginning stages, and that's really exciting. It's also really hard at the beginning to keep bringing people in and keep building up a local movement.
Part of my vision is support from Strong Towns for those groups that are at the two-, three-, or 10-person stage and wanting to grow so that they have the tools, support, and training they need to do that successfully and realize those visions that they have for their places.
What are some of the biggest challenges you see the groups running into? If someone listening to this is thinking, 'I want to get started, but I'm feeling a little intimidated or overwhelmed at the thought of that,' how would you speak to that?
If you're just getting started, welcome. Awesome. You're in the right place, and you have everything that you need. Your next step is to bring a friend. Find a neighbor, find a coworker, or find somebody on social media. They don't have to have read everything from Strong Towns, and it's honestly maybe better if they're bringing in fresh perspective and are interested in housing for one specific reason.
Start bringing those people together. Strong Towns has a local conversation leader course. We have different leader trainings every week, so start coming and building with us in that way as well.
To the challenge, I think the first challenge is starting. The second challenge that I hear the most as people are getting going is where to meet, when to meet, and how to meet in a way that allows more people to come in and feel welcomed. It's hard to find a third space where you can meet, so that's a big challenge that people face in the beginning.
Okay.
As groups grow, the challenge is more leadership. It's easy, if you come in as a Strong Towns advocate and want to start a local conversation, to end up leading too many projects, burning out, losing energy, and losing steam. I think a huge challenge to navigate as a local conversation and as an advocacy group is how to keep bringing in new leaders.
The role of a local conversation organizer is to organize yourself out of a job, to bring in enough great people who are doing great work with you that you become just one of the team. That's a really hard thing to do if you're the one starting a local conversation and you've got all of the excitement and energy, but it's a challenge that is indicative of your group doing great things.
If everything starts falling on you, what a great challenge to have. There's all this stuff to do, and now more people can get involved in it.
How has doing this work and working with Strong Towns changed the way you see your town? You said you're based in Minneapolis now, Minnesota. Where in Minnesota are you?
Yes, I'm based in Minneapolis.
Okay, great.
Minneapolis is a great city, and I notice flexible delineators now. That was not something I had a word for. I notice flexi posts, I notice when they're knocked over, and I notice when they're put up new.
I moved in the middle of winter. There's a protected bike lane on the way to an ice cream spot that I like that has the flexible delineators, the flexi posts, between the cars and the bikes. When it snowed, all the snow piled up there, and it became this really protected bike lane because the snow was keeping the bikes from the cars.
I never would have noticed something like that before joining Strong Towns staff. That, and how long crosswalks are. I never noticed how long crosswalks are.
That's funny. That's so fun. This is the last question I ask everyone who comes on the show: tell us a little bit about your neighborhood. What are some places you like to recommend that people check out if they come by to visit?
I love my neighborhood. As I said, I just moved there this winter, this February. We have a bike path that goes down to various lakes and over to the Mississippi River bike path. I can walk to three different coffee shops and two different bakeries. That's never been something I've been able to do before, and it's been bad for my budget, but great for my quality of life.
Think of it this way: you don't have to get a gym membership now.
Exactly. I just have to walk the four blocks. It's amazing.
Give me the name of one coffee shop and one bakery that you like to plug, or you can give me as many as you want.
The three coffee shops that I'm near are Sister Sludge, which is incredible, Northern Coffeeworks, and Fireroast Coffee. They're all three in different directions from my apartment, and they all have really good baked goods too. If you're in the Minneapolis area, that's where I would stop.
Awesome. Mary Kate, thank you so much for coming on the show with me. I know you're busy with National Gathering, and I'm so grateful you took the time. It was great to meet you virtually, so to speak, and capture some of your excitement for your role on this podcast. I really appreciate it, and thanks for the work that you're doing. I'm sure everybody who is leading a local conversation group is very grateful for the support that you all are providing them.
Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
It's been my pleasure. To our listeners, thank you so much for joining me for another conversation. I'll be back soon with another episode. If there's someone who you think I should have on the show, please let me know using the suggested guest form. That's how we find out about a lot of people, and I'm so grateful for those of you who take the time to nominate them.
I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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.