Nominate Your City for our 4th Annual Strongest Town Contest!
We're thrilled to announce the beginning of the 4th Annual Strongest Town Contest. Consider it our own answer to March Madness: every year, while the rest of the country is going crazy about their NCAA basketball brackets, we're over here getting pumped about the bracket that will determine the strongest town in the world—with help from you.
The winning town will receive a visit from Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn, to celebrate the victory and share the Strong Towns message.
It starts with nominations. To nominate your town, simply fill out this short application. You don't need to be an elected official or member of your local chamber of commerce or anything like that, though you can be. You just need to be able to talk about what makes your community strong (though we encourage you to gather some fellow residents and make it a team effort).
Pop-up shops in 2018’s Strongest Town Contest winner, Muskegon, Michigan.
Tell us how your city or town is working to build enduring financial resilience.
Tell us what makes your city or town unique and worth celebrating, and how it embraces its local strengths.
Tell us about your town’s strong citizens: its grassroots advocates, local entrepreneurs, small-scale developers, and/or anyone else working to make it a stronger place from the bottom up.
And tell us what local leaders are doing to support those efforts, and to embrace the Strong Towns approach to growth and development.
Applications are due by 11 p.m. CDT on Sunday, March 10th, 2019.
Read our full contest rules and see additional deadlines here.
Once we've received your applications, Strong Towns staff and board members will review them and select the best 16 to compete in the initial bracket, which kicks off on Monday, March 18th. Throughout the following weeks, we'll invite our members, readers and listeners to vote on match-ups between these towns, based on a mix of written submissions, photos, podcast interviews, and even a live webcast with the championship contenders. So if your town makes it into additional rounds of the contest, you'll be asked to submit additional materials. We recommend taking a close look at the contest schedule so you know what to anticipate in future rounds.
Throughout the contest, Strong Towns members and readers will vote for their pick for 2019's Strongest Town. The winning town will receive a visit from Strong Towns President, Chuck Marohn, and an in-depth profile on our website that we’ll share with our millions of readers worldwide. (Read about Chuck’s visit to last year’s winner: Muskegon, Michigan.)
Worried that your town is too small, too distant or not strong enough to apply? Fear not! In the past two years of this contest, we've had applicants from as far away as Wollongong, Australia, as big as San Francisco and as small as Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Don't let your desire for perfection prevent you from entering this contest either. Our focus is on finding the town that is doing its best to become strong. We know that no town is perfect. Show us the best that your town has to offer, and what you're doing to become even stronger.
Get more information and nominate your town here.
May the best town win!