Seairra Jones serves as the Lead Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. She currently resides between small-town Illinois and the rural Midwest with her husband, where they help manage a family homestead. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our towns stronger, you can find her outside working on the farm, writing fictional tales in a coffee shop, or reading in a hammock.
Read MoreMichel Durand-Wood lives in the Winnipeg neighborhood of Elmwood with his wife and three children. He writes at DearWinnipeg.com, a really fun blog about infrastructure and municipal finance. He has no formal training or education in city planning, municipal finance, infrastructure maintenance, or anything else he talks about. He's just a guy, in love with a city, asking it to make better use of his tax dollars.
Read MoreGrace Whatley is the Development Resource Specialist at Strong Towns, creating key resources, collateral, project proposals and grant applications that support specific programmatic initiatives and accelerate the mission of Strong Towns at large. Growing up in small-town New England, she is a proponent of strong rural communities and their innate relationships to the land around them. Prior to joining the Strong Towns team, Grace lived and worked in the remote desert 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 variably in printmaking, drawing/painting, and ceramics. Grace now lives in Delta, Colorado with her partner, a cat and dog, a small collection of terrarium animals, and a large collection of rocks and houseplants.
Are you interested in strategically supporting the Strong Towns mission? Get in touch with Grace.
Read MoreKarla Theilen is the Neighborhood Storyteller at Strong Towns. Karla is a writer, storyteller, and Registered Nurse based out of Missoula, Montana. Her penchant to explore wild places informed early career choices as a trail builder in the Grand Canyon, and a forest fire lookout in Idaho. Her current writing inspiration comes from a different kind of wilderness, navigating healing journeys with her patients in far-flung places where she works as a travel nurse. Her writing has been featured on NPR, and select stories and essays have been anthologized. She has been Facebook-free since 1972.
Read MoreJay Stange is an experienced community development consultant, journalist, grassroots organizer, musician, teacher, and off-grid project manager. Raised in Alaska, his passions include transforming transportation systems and making it easier to live closer to where we work, play, and do our daily rounds. Find him shopping for groceries on his cargo bike, gardening, and coaching soccer in West Hartford, Connecticut, where he lives with his family. You can connect with him on Twitter at @corvidity.
Read MoreAlissa Danckaert-Skovira teaches writing at Kent State University. She has a background in English and history, and she enjoys anything and everything to do with research and writing. Her interests include historic preservation, politics, gardening, and all things Akron.
Read MoreJen Jones Donatelli is a Cleveland-based author and journalist. Currently, she is the editor of FreshWater Cleveland, an online publication that covers the people, places, and projects shaping and transforming Cleveland. She is also a contributing editor for Destination Cleveland’s city guides and has written for other regional publications including Cleveland Magazine and Ohio Today. On a national level, her work has appeared in GOOD, Redbook, Budget Travel, Robb Report, Los Angeles Confidential, and more.
You can find Jen on Twitter at @creativegroove and @FreshWaterCLE.
Jen writes as part of an ongoing engagement with Akron, Ohio, supported by the Knight Foundation. Learn more about it here.
Read MoreLaura Dorwart has written for The New York Times, SheKnows, Bustle, Bitch, VICE, Catapult, McSweeney's, and HuffPost, among other outlets. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University and was a Fletcher B. Jones Dissertation Fellow at UC San Diego. She lives in Ohio.
Read MoreKailey Sherrick lives in Wooster, Ohio and works as a Social Media Manager. She's a recent graduate of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) program, where she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Besides writing, Kailey enjoys playing softball, gardening, spending time with her family, and being involved in her community.
Read MoreJason Schaefer served as Strong Towns' Member Support Specialist from 2015-2016. Jason has always had a strong interest in cities and has lived in some great ones, including Almuñécar, Spain; Missoula, MT; Boston, MA; Washington, DC; Fargo, ND; and, of course, Grand Forks, ND. Last year, he was awarded a McCloy Fellowship to study urban sustainability initiatives while visiting Amsterdam and seven cities across Germany.
He is very involved in urbanism efforts in his hometown of Grand Forks, ND where he sits on the boards of the Downtown Development Association and the US Green Building Council - North Dakota chapter. He was a featured speaker at TEDx Grand Forks where he shared his vision for a transit and development corridor.
Read MoreCharles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.
Read MoreSarah was the Strong Towns 2021 Summer Intern, in partnership with Urban3. Sarah graduated with a bachelor's degree in Urban Planning & Design from the University of Missouri–Kansas City in May of 2021. She is passionate about neighborhoods and advocating for the individuals within them. Her goal is to use her planning education to support practices that help strengthen communities. She also enjoys traveling, hanging out with her dogs, and experimenting with vegan baking.
Read MoreMichelle 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.
Read MoreLauren Ronnander, the Director of Communications 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.
Read MoreDaniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.
Read MoreAbby Newsham 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.
Read MoreAlexa 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.
Read MoreJohn Pattison is the Community Builder for Strong Towns. In this role, he works with advocates in hundreds of communities as they start and lead local Strong Towns groups called Local Conversations. John 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. He also co-hosts The Membership, a podcast inspired by the life and work of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, writer, and activist. 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.
Read MoreAndrew Price (Twitter: @AndrewAPrice) has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2013 and is a founding member of the organization. Andrew is a software developer by day and an urbanist by night. He is passionate about traditional urbanism – he believes in fine-grained, highly walkable places that are built for people. He grew up in Australia and now lives in the United States with his wife. Andrew is a regular contributor on Strong Towns and runs his own blog, andrewalexanderprice.com. You can find many of his photographs throughout the Strong Towns website. Andrew’s motivation to be involved in Strong Towns and urbanism is to create a great place that he and his wife, and one day their children and their future generations will want to call home.
Read MoreSarah Kobos has been a regular contributor for Strong Towns since 2016. She is an urban design nerd and community activist from Tulsa, OK. Her superpower is the ability to transform almost any topic into a conversation about zoning. Whenever possible, she explores other cities and writes about urban design and land use issues at AccidentalUrbanist.com.
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