Two Weeks Left to Show Off Your Town's Strengths to the World!
The applications are rolling in for our 4th Annual Strongest Town Contest, sponsored by CivicBrand, Urban3, and Verdunity. If you haven’t applied yet, there’s still plenty of time for your town to be a part of it. Contest entries are due by midnight Eastern time on Sunday, March 10th, 2019.
Click here for more information, including full contest rules.
Does Your Town Have What It Takes?
Does your town or city commit to #DoTheMath and make investments that build wealth and fiscal stability for the long run? Tell us how.
Does your town or city have a great street, neighborhood, or downtown that’s just bursting with local character? Show it off!
Does your town involve citizens in decision-making in innovative ways?
Does your town make bottom-up, incremental investments in quality of life?
Does your town encourage private citizens who want to do the same—say, by starting a business or developing a small vacant lot?
Has your town made some mistakes in the past, but is now working really hard to change course and chart a resilient future? Tell us how.
No city or town is too big or small to enter. And anyone can submit an application—an individual or a team. Elected officials, city staff or simply proud citizens.
Tell the world what makes your hometown strong: Enter our bracket-based competition to find the Strongest Town.
The winning town will receive a profile on the Strong Towns site for our millions of annual readers around the world, and a special visit from Strong Towns founder and president Charles Marohn.
Please email daniel@strongtowns.org with any questions not answered by the contest information page.
A Special Thank You to Our Sponsors
The Strongest Town contest is sponsored this year by three generous donors: CivicBrand, Urban3, and Verdunity.
CivicBrand is a branding and marketing agency that works to help cities and towns develop their unique strengths. CivicBrand was founded by Ryan Short, who wanted to take his experience running a successful design and marketing agency and use it to improve communities. Today, CivicBrand works directly with cities, Convention & Visitors’ Bureaus and Chambers of Commerce on branding, digital strategy, web development and community engagement. CivicBrand also works with architecture and planning firms to create project branding, project websites and community engagement strategies around community initiatives such as comprehensive plans and redevelopment projects. You can learn more about their work and contact them at CivicBrand.com.
Urban3 is a private consulting firm specializing in land value economics, property and retail tax analysis and community design. Urban3 helps communities make better decisions through the understanding of data and design, simplifying complex information to include everyone in real conversations about community growth. What makes Urban3 distinctive is their ability to visualize and communicate the fiscal health of your community by combining an examination of local development history, the implications of policy, patterns of development down to the level of individual parcels, and their experience with different finance systems around the world. Urban3 seeks to empower its clients with the ability to promote development patterns that secure the community's fiscal condition while reinforcing a stronger sense of place.
In addition to financially supporting Strong Towns, Urban3 collaborates with Strong Towns on many tax analysis and data visualization projects as well as events around the country. See Urban3's work on the Strong Towns website.
Verdunity is a Dallas-based community consulting firm focused on building healthy and fiscally resilient places. Inspired by the Strong Towns message, Verdunity brings planning, engineering and urban design perspectives together to identify and design infrastructure projects that balance urban and natural systems, improve fiscal productivity and create places where people want to be.
In 2018, Verdunity launched its Go Cultivate! podcast and blog—dedicated to helping community builders make improvements in themselves, their neighborhoods, and their cities. Their work makes frequent guest appearances on the Strong Towns website. Read VERDUNITY's articles and podcast interviews on our site.
(Cover photo: Collage of strong citizens from 2016 champion Carlisle, PA.)