Strong Citizens Challenge: Walk to the Grocery Store

At the national gathering we talked about the potential for undertaking personal “Strong Citizen” challenges as a way of growing our own ideas and spreading the movement.

There were many different ideas for challenges thrown out there, but one that came up over and over again was to simply walk to get your groceries. For some folks this is a normal part of daily life, but for many people this is something they've never tried. We'd like to capture both ends of the spectrum.

With that in mind, here's our Strong Citizens challenge for you:

Take a walk to get your groceries. Take some pictures if you like. Share the story of your experience and whatever observations you took away from it, on the Strong Towns Forum. I've posted my own story there as an example, feel free to use that as a template for yours.

We want to collect a bunch of stories, and hopefully glean some interesting, funny and/or inspirational insights from these stories, so we'd be happy to hear whatever you have to share. We'll share highlights of these stories on the main blog from time to time.

We also want to provide sets of easy “things to do” for any regular person who hears about Strong Towns and wants to start getting involved. Our goal is to have meaningful activities that anyone can do without any special resources or permission. Please free to discuss that aspect of things on the forum as well.

The “walk to the grocery store” challenge is our first little experiment of doing "Strong Citizen Challenges". We'll try some things out and learn as we go, and hopefully get better at creating and sharing these challenges as we go.

Thanks everyone for your participation, and for doing what you can to build Strong Towns. I'm looking forward to hearing your stories!