Somerset, Kentucky, had historical markers scattered around downtown, but Jody McRoberts suspected many people barely noticed them. Through Strong Towns Pulaski, she turned those overlooked signs into a reason for people to slow down and look more closely at the place they lived. The group organized a walking tour, recruited five volunteer guides, and partnered with the local historical society to add research beyond what was written on each marker. One stop at the century-old Virginia Theater opened up a bigger question: What is an old building worth to a downtown when saving it costs money, but losing it would leave a hole behind?
Hello and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and Bottom Up Shorts gives us an opportunity to introduce you to many of the members of the Strong Towns movement, people who are participating in driving local change. What I love about it, too, is bringing in additional hands, voices, and participants in order to build stronger communities.
With me today is Jody McRoberts, a resident of Somerset, Kentucky, within Pulaski County. She is the leader of Strong Towns Pulaski and has been a Strong Towns member for coming on six years now. It's awesome to have you on Bottom Up Shorts. Welcome, Jody.
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
I'd love it if you would dive right into the opportunity, but also the challenges, of leading Strong Towns Pulaski and bringing people together while knowing we're in this for the long haul and there will be some ups and downs. You wanted to share a little bit about your story?
As far as starting the group here, I've been a follower of Strong Towns since 2019. We lived at that time in Morgan Hill, California, just south of San Jose in the Silicon Valley area. We moved out here to a much more rural area, and I was talking to the mayor of Somerset, the largest city and the seat of the county here. I mentioned, "Have you ever heard of Strong Towns?" He said, "No." So I gave him Chuck Marohn's first Strong Towns book. He read it, and he was very interested.
We set up a meeting, and then I gave the book to another lady and we met. To become an official group, you have to have at least one meeting with three people. Shortly after that, the one lady I thought was going to be right alongside me, very enthusiastic, had some shifts in her life and was no longer able to help. I thought, "Okay, where do we go from here?" The mayor is still very supportive of what we do, but not really involved. So I've kind of felt that Strong Towns Pulaski feels a little bit like me.
In the meantime, I continue. We have a Facebook group where I post articles and videos, and I know that more people in the community are learning about Strong Towns. I did a survey several months back just to see, and I had about a dozen people fill it out. It sounds like there are people reading the articles and watching the videos. Even though I've struggled to say, "How can we get involved?" I just keep going along.
There is a lady who came to one of the meetings when we were meeting in person, and she seems more interested. She's gone through the training, and she's also there at the meetings. She's involved with other things in the community, so she can't help me too much. After talking to Mary Kate from Strong Towns, she said, "Keep plugging along. This is fine. You just keep going forward wherever you're at, and as long as you're still there, you haven't fallen off the map. You're still a legitimate group."
For me, it's just that. I coined a phrase for our group: education to action. I want people to learn all the things I've learned. Then we say, "What is it we can do in our local communities?"
This is so relevant because many of our group leaders, especially in smaller communities, but not only there, find that they go through seasons where they've got a handful of folks and then it dwindles a little bit. But it makes a difference in a community to have an organization committed to these principles and ideals over a patient passage of time, continually saying, "Hey, we notice this," or, "We're observing these changes in our community," or, "These things ought to change in healthier ways."
You used a walking tour utilizing the historic signs that your community had set up. Do you want to share a little bit about that? What was the vision for it, and how did you bring that together?
About three years ago, the city of Somerset installed historical signs. They used ARPA funds, the American Rescue Act funds from the COVID era, and that was how they mainly funded these signs. They're around the downtown area mainly. There are some outlying signs, but I began to think that everybody has different giftings. I try to really observe things, and I know probably a lot of people didn't even know the signs were there, or maybe they walked or drove past them and didn't really engage with them.
So I thought, "What if we organize a walking tour using these signs?" I just went for it. I put the call out on the Facebook page asking if any of them wanted to be guides, and I had five ladies volunteer. This summer we're doing three tours. We just completed two of them, one in June and one in July, with another in August.
The other really cool thing is that I involved the historical society. I thought, "We could read verbatim from these signs, but what if we ask them to do further research? Can you give us more information so people can hear some different things?" For 10 of the 12 signs, we actually have a script that the historical society gave us, so people come downtown and learn more than what is written on the signs.
One thing that was really great is the historical society decided to do research on a building where there's no sign in front of it. That building has a lot of historical significance. It's the Virginia Theater, and that building was at risk of falling into great disrepair or being demolished. The city stepped in and put money into it. There's still debate because it's not making a profit, and some people are concerned about that.
This was a tough situation. The owners of the building wanted to hand it off to someone else, but no one stepped in. They went to a downtown development organization that existed at the time. I learned last week from one of the tour guides that the city bought it from them for $1 several years ago. They were able to do a grand reopening in April 2022, when the building was 100 years old.
Now they bring people into the theater and have changed it into a kind of concert venue, even though they still show movies. The point is, should the city have spent the money? It's still in the hole, but it brings commerce in because people come, maybe stay in hotels, and shop. We also don't have a hole in the streetscape, which could have happened.
I brought that up as we stopped in front of that building so people could really think and ponder: What should we do with situations like this? I think the tours have been a good experience, and we hope to continue them in the coming years.
As we think about gaps in our streetscapes, I think of a tooth with a cavity. You do have the option to just knock it out, and I think that's often been the default approach in some of our places: "Well, it's not worth keeping." But we could have recovered it, saved it, and extended the duration of a beloved character within the community that maybe has fallen on hard times.
Walking and observing, and saying, "Did you know that this building has this significance?" introduces people to the fabric and character of the various buildings and markers of the passage of time in our places. I find there to be so much value in that exercise, and I love that you also right away made it possible for other people to participate.
I get a sense from your email address, Coach Jody, that you already have the ability to help other people do what they might otherwise be worried about doing or nervous about trying. Do you want to share a little bit about your own approach and philosophy to this? I think there are things that will really resonate with others as well.
I do some personal coaching on the side, so you hit the nail on the head there. I have a boldness in my personality where, even though I'm more of a quiet person, if I feel something needs to be said, I'll say it. I've spoken in front of the city council a couple of times. They know about Strong Towns. One of the city council members once said, "Hey, you should check out what Jody's doing at Strong Towns."
For me, it's about speaking up when we feel we should and getting involved. That's one thing I think is so important for those of us who have a heart for our communities: you show up. The city council meetings of Somerset are on Facebook, so I can watch them after the fact. The fiscal court meetings, which is our county government, are on YouTube. There are four other small cities in the county that don't record their meetings, but I watch what I can, whether I'm cooking or cleaning, so I know what's going on.
I'm choosing to be intentional with the gifts that I have, knowing that I'm someone who can be a spokesperson. I could sit on the side and say nothing, or I can ask, "Are there places that I can speak? Are there ways that I can get involved?" Initially, we were meeting at the city council chambers because the mayor of Somerset was very gracious and offered for us to meet there, but I was not seeing a consistent crowd. At the last meeting we had guests, but it was just my husband and me from the group. So I said, "I think we need to pivot."
I think intentionality and not giving up are important. Whatever gifts you have, use those. If you feel you have leadership or speaking-up gifts, one of the very best things I recommend is to know what's going on in the city. Take the time to watch the meetings. Go to the ribbon cuttings. Go to the Chamber of Commerce luncheons. Whatever you can do, visit other organizations and their meetings just to see what they're about, even if you don't plan to join.
If you feel you have a gift for leadership, get out, step out, get involved, and be intentional. Even in our neighborhood, we have neighborhood potlucks. That requires the boldness to put flyers on people's doorsteps. I've met people in my neighborhood I wouldn't know if I hadn't done that. They end up coming to the potluck, and now we're neighbors and friends too. So I think it's really about making the choice to be bold, even when it seems a bit scary, and moving forward with the giftings you have.
Fantastic. That resonates in a ton of ways. What stands out in what you've shared is that, in addition to or in advance of establishing a more formal Strong Towns Local Conversation group, you can be an ambassador of Strong Towns ideas. I love that people on council are saying, "Hey, you want to talk about local issues? Go talk with Jody."
When people join other associations or organizations within the community, you can represent Strong Towns without leading with the trademark, the big brand, or knocking them out with a book right out of the gates. Instead, it's introducing ideas at key moments: "Hey, we're really grappling with this. Is it possible that our pattern of development is playing a role here, or that some of the things we've done to change our communities are not as strong as the original patterns were?" There's nuance and there are challenges to communicating that well, but creating those inroads can spark a lot of curiosity for people.
This is where the walking tour example is so good, because once you see certain things in your community, you can't unsee them. When we're strategic about pointing out things that should be obvious and yet are easily overlooked, that's a superpower. That's a really valuable skill. It gives people enough to think, "Whenever I see that, I think of Jody, I think of Strong Towns, or I think of these types of ideas."
Do you have any other tips or suggestions, something you've picked up that you'd love to pass along to other people as well?
I probably answered a lot of that in the last question. Be intentional. Find out where you can be involved and really get to know your community. Anybody who's listening to this or has anything to do with Strong Towns is probably someone who loves their community.
For instance, another way of being involved is that I went through the Master Gardeners program in our county. We have a great program, and I love hanging out with those people and learning how to garden. Someone said, "Let's grow a row." Because of my involvement in the community, I know there's a local recovery center for women. It's awesome, and I think they have maybe 100 ladies. All these sweet potatoes we're planting in this bed that the 4-H planted are going to go to this organization.
That's another way of being involved. It's not Strong Towns, but any way you can take that love for the community and be involved, the more people you can get to know and network with. Even if the Strong Towns idea is food security, this happens to be through the Master Gardeners. But I hope to make that one little connection because of someone I knew in the community through my intentionality.
I'm always looking for ways to connect with people and to really care. That's the thing, because we can come in and say, "We should do this," or, "We should do that." But if you don't have relationships with people, it will fall flat. If it seems like you're just coming in and saying we have to change these things or do this, but you have relationships with people and they know that you really care, I think that makes a huge difference.
I always love to ask: What is it that gives you hope or inspires you in your community as you do this work?
Seriously, when I saw that question, I paused to think about it. My answer is because there are still people here. We humans can do things that can be really foolish, even evil, or we can just say, "This is the way it's always been done." That is now getting exposed with the suburban experiment. Will we always just keep building new roads? We're going to have increasing debt on the federal, state, county, and local level.
Even in the city of Somerset in the last several years, because there were some mandatory repairs they had to do with their sewer and different things, you hear about it just watching the city meeting and the fiscal court meeting. We can only pave or resurface so many roads per year. There are tough questions that we have to answer.
We can just do things the way they've always been done. Or we can say, "Let's think about this, though." When we as humans take a step back, that's what I admire about what Chuck Marohn did. He was an engineer, crunching the numbers and saying, "Something's not adding up." He made that choice to say, "Is there a better way that we can do this?" Through his inspiration, and through other organizations and people, there's that mindset of being bold and saying, "Is there another way we can look at this?"
We can follow the path that says this is just how it is, or we can say, "No, let's take a look at this." That's the hope: there are people who, in our hearts, even though we can be really wicked and sinful, can also really care and love. When we come in as community members who really care for people, we can spread that care and love, and we can see that even in how we build our cities. The human spirit can encompass everything we do. We can really see good in our communities. We just have to make that choice.
Jody, that's powerful and beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I think it's a great way for us to conclude. If you are in the Pulaski County area, please reach out to Jody and the folks at Strong Towns Pulaski and continue to participate with them.
If you go to strongtowns.org/local, you can look up whether there is a Local Conversation group anywhere near you. I would say even if it's 45 minutes away or an hour away, reach out to that group leader and say, "Hey, could I join you? I want to learn about what you're doing." In time, that may inspire you, as it has in many other instances, to get involved as well.
With that, thank you so much for listening to this Bottom Up Short. Thank you so much, Jody, for joining us.
Oh, thanks. It's been great to be here.
It's a treat and a pleasure. I really appreciate your time. I hope, as you do the work in your communities, that you're encouraged by the power of humble observation and then following that up with really robust and good conversations.
This is good and important work because, as Jody said, people live here, and people are why this is valuable, why it's worth it, and why we can certainly have a great deal of hope. With that, 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.