Strong Towns Featured in Philanthropy Journal
Strong Towns was honored to be invited to submit an article to the Philanthropy Journal recently. The Philanthropy Journal serves nonprofits and their supporters by helping them tell their stories and increase their capacity, and is a program of the Institute for Nonprofits at NC State University in Raleigh, NC.
Strong Towns' Communications Director, Rachel Quednau, wrote an article called, "Broadening the Conversation," which discusses the growth of the Strong Towns movement and lessons learned along the way:
By tailoring its message to a broad audience, testing ideas on a small scale, and aligning its funding model to its mission, the organization ensures that everyone stays focused on the mission and the core principles that inspire it.
The Strong Towns conversation reaches beyond technical professionals. “We started having this technical conversation and quickly realized that it was far more than just technical people who were listening,” Marohn explains. That has helped the movement gain traction and grow tremendously.
“By having our conversation be open and real, yet not dumbed down, we’ve reached a broad group of people; much broader than we ever anticipated,” says Marohn. This is especially significant because the issues that Strong Towns addresses—things like municipal finance, suburban development, and transportation—tend to be highly partisan. By speaking and writing about them in non-partisan terms, political gaps between readers and listeners grow smaller, and the movement grows bigger.
(Top photo by Johnny Sanphillippo)