Our Staff

Charles Marohn—known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues—is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and civil engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.

Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019) and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley 2021). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America.

Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.

Edward Erfurt is the Director of Community Action at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.

Michelle Erfurt serves as Strong Towns' Event Pathfinder. Guided by a passion for helping people, her first career was in music therapy. She spent her clinical years working to decrease pain, improve coping, and enhance interpersonal relationships of hospice and hospitalized patients.

Those therapeutic skills have served her well. In her work at Strong Towns, Michelle navigates people through the process of bringing a Strong Towns event to their area in a way that helps them achieve their goals to help build a stronger place.

Would you like to bring Strong Towns staff to your town for a speaking engagement? Please email Michelle.

Tony Harris is the Action Team Coordinator at Strong Towns. Tony was drawn to further his career with Strong Towns because the organization places collective well-being, incremental action, and humility at the center of its approach to critiquing development patterns and catalyzing community growth. Prior to joining the team, Tony worked in operations and communications with start-up ventures operating across the renewable energy and collaborative technology markets. His vocational experience spans across project management, process design, facilitation, fundraising, and organizational development. Tony holds a Master of Arts in conflict transformation from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. He currently calls Annapolis, Maryland, home and spends a lot of his free time by the Chesapeake Bay.

Daniel Herriges serves as Editor-in-Chief for Strong Towns, writing feature articles and speaking across the country on behalf of the organization. He has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development. He grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, before moving west to the San Francisco Bay Area, and later east to Sarasota, Florida, where he lives with his wife, daughter, son, and too many pets.

Daniel’s obsession with maps began before he could read; a general fascination with cities and how they work was soon to follow. He can often be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods (of his own town or another) on foot or bicycle. Daniel’s lifelong environmentalism can also be traced all the way back to age 4, when he yelled at his parents for stepping on weeds growing in sidewalk cracks.

Abby Kinney is the cohost of the Upzoned podcast. Abby is an urban design and planning consultant at Multistudio in Kansas City, Missouri. In her own community, she works to advance bottom-up strategies that enhance both private development and the public realm, and facilitates the ad-hoc Kansas City chapter of the Incremental Development Alliance. When she’s not geeking out over cities, Abby is an avid urban mountain biker (because: potholes), audiobook and podcast junkie, amateur rock climber, and guitarist. You can connect with Abby on Twitter at @abbykatkc.

Alexa Mendieta serves as a Development Associate for Strong Towns. After graduating from the University of Richmond, she worked at Historic St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, where Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Now she is excited to be sharing the Strong Towns movement and working to make towns more for the people. Outside of work, she enjoys going on walks, houseplants and gardening, and dreaming of the day when she’ll own a dog.

Are you interested in strategically supporting the Strong Towns mission? Get in touch with Alexa.

Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.

Michael Pasternock is the Video Producer for Strong Towns. After graduating from the University of Missouri, he taught high school English and government in CoMo. Mike and his wife then moved to Arizona, making his side-hustle wedding filmmaking business his full-time job. Mike also worked as chief editor for several prominent YouTubers around the Phoenix area. After discovering Strong Towns and resonating with the message, he realized that his hometown of Chicago was a better fit for his family’s lifestyle. He now lives near the lake and loves to document his travels on camera, play board games with friends, and explore the many delicious restaurants near his lively neighborhood.

John Pattison is the Community Builder for Strong Towns. He is the author of two books, most recently Slow Church (IVP), which takes inspiration from Slow Food and the other Slow movements to help faith communities reimagine how they live life together in the neighborhood. John and his family live in Silverton, Oregon. You can connect with him on Twitter at @johnepattison.

Want to start a Local Conversation, or implement the Strong Towns approach in your community? Email John.

Evan Pesch is the Web and Graphic Designer for Strong Towns. Raised in a household with a local historian and a city planner in Muskegon, Michigan (our 2018 Strongest Town Contest winner), he’s always found a way to tie his own interest in design and creative work back to the city he called home. After creating several projects to get involved in his community, he left to get a bachelor’s degree studying user experience design at the University of Michigan. He later bounced around as a designer, web developer, and artist for numerous organizations before returning to his hometown in search of new ways to apply his varied skillset to improve the city he loves. If you want to find him, just visit Muskegon’s Lakeshore Trail. He’ll likely wander by you soon.

Rachel Quednau serves as Program Director, managing the content team at Strong Towns, as well as hosting our Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. Trained in dialogue facilitation and mediation, she is devoted to building understanding across lines of difference. Previously, Rachel worked for several organizations fighting to end homelessness and promote safe, affordable housing at the federal and local levels. Rachel also served as Content Manager for Strong Towns from 2015-2018. A native Minnesotan and honorary Wisconsinite, Rachel received a Masters in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School and a Certificate in Conflict Transformation from the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium, both in 2020. She currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband Jack and son Marshall. One of her favorite ways to get to know a new city is by going for a walk in it.

Lauren Ronnander, the Communications Manager for Strong Towns, is an actual idealist who loves making things and double-spacing the end of sentences. Before joining the Strong Towns team in 2020, she worked as a journalist and an editor. She lives with her husband and an almost uncountable number of animals (including cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, and rabbits) in a super-awesome neighborhood in the American Midwest. Her experience in the Alaska Bush, downtown living in an up-and-coming Midwestern city, and now residing in a rural Chippewa Valley, Wisconsin, community has provided her with precious insight into the many ways our places can grow stronger.

Are you a member of the media and want to talk about Strong Towns? Email Lauren.

Shina Shayesteh serves as the Content Manager/Copy Editor for Strong Towns. She self-identifies as a jack of all trades, with a master’s degree in history and a background in education, linguistics, research, and digital art. Although she is a native Houstonian, she is currently meandering up the east coast with her dog, Tintin. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling abroad, playing tabletop RPGs, needlework, studying other languages, and coercing her friends into eating weird foods.

Seairra Sheppard serves as the Staff Writer/Multimedia Creator for Strong Towns. As a journalist and videographer, she loves to capture ideas and share them through different mediums. Her experiences filming and writing around the world have given her a perspective on how people of different cities build their communities and thrive. She has a passion for walkability in towns, accessible recreation, fresh food availability, health, and sustainability. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our cities stronger, you can find her outside working on a farm, writing her own stories, reading, or exploring the world on a hike.

Christa Theilen is the Office Assistant for Strong Towns. She’s a former teacher who recently moved back to her hometown after almost 20 years. She’s very happy to be a member of the Strong Towns team, where supporting her teammates and crossing things off her to-do list give her great satisfaction.

Linda serves as Strong Towns’ Controller. After a long career in corporate accounting and finance, she is happy to apply her skills and experience in the nonprofit sector. Originally from Maryland, she moved to Charleston, South Carolina, over 20 years ago, and is now grateful to live just a block away from the beach on Edisto Island. She enjoys good books, good food, and the company of good friends. She also loves to travel, and is looking forward to new adventures in the near future.

Got a question about billing or payments? Email Linda.

Grace Whatley is a Development Associate at Strong Towns, focusing on grants and major donors. Growing up in small-town New England, she is a proponent of strong rural communities and the wilderness around them. Prior to joining the Strong Towns team, Grace lived and worked in the remote community of Green River, Utah, where she facilitated an artist residency, managed small-scale downtown revitalization projects, and secured grant funding from private and public sources. She is also an artist herself, working in various printmaking, drawing, and painting mediums. Grace is now relocating from Utah to East Texas with her cat, Winnie, and is eager to explore a new region through the Strong Towns lens.

Are you interested in strategically supporting the Strong Towns mission? Get in touch with Grace.