Who Else Wants a Stronger Community in 2020?

It’s natural to use the start of a new year—not to mention a new decade—to reflect and refocus on our priorities for ourselves, our families, and our work.

Yet the new year can also be the right time to identify what our priorities will be for our towns and cities over the coming months too. We’ve been calling them “neighborhood resolutions.”

For example, many people (including me) intend to walk and bike more in 2020. These activities check all the boxes: they are good for us physically and emotionally, good for the environment, good for us financially, good for the community, and just plain fun.

But as soon as we step out the door we’re reminded that the built environment often works at cross-purposes to our best intentions for our own flourishing. By and large, our communities have not been developed with walkers and cyclists—i.e., the human body—in mind. Rather, they have been planned around the goal of moving cars as quickly and efficiently as possible. That makes newly resolved pedestrians vulnerable. So in addition to walking and biking more this year, some of us are also resolving ways to make our towns and cities more walkable and bikeable.

That’s just one example.

Another neighborhood resolution might be to complete at least one cycle of the four-step Strong Towns public investment process. As Charles Marohn said back in September, “the best investments…address a real and urgent need experienced by a human.” Here’s the four-step process:

1. Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.

2. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?

3. Do that thing. Do it right now.

4. Repeat.

Still another neighborhood resolution might be to attend at least one city council or planning commission meeting in the coming year. It sounds simple, and perhaps even easy, but don’t mistake how powerful it can be for even one citizen to move from disengaged to engaged, absent to present, passive to active.

Your Neighborhood Resolutions

This week we put out the call on the Strong Towns community site, Facebook group, and Facebook page, asking you to let us know what your neighborhood resolutions are for 2020. We loved the responses. We also wanted to share some of them, for four reasons:

1. So we all know how we can best support one another

2. So they might inspire folks who haven’t settled on a neighborhood resolution of their own yet

3. So we know we’re not alone

4. Because this (below) is what the “bottom-up revolution” looks like

At the end of this post are a few tips for how to actually achieve your neighborhood resolutions this year. (The tips work for any New Year’s resolutions, really.) But, first, here a few neighborhood resolutions from the Strong Towns community.

And, finally, one of our favorites:

Tips for Achieving Your Neighborhood Resolutions in 2020

Everything I know about good goal-setting I learned from Michael Hyatt, the former CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, a New York Times bestselling author, and the creator of the Full Focus Planner (not an official Strong Towns endorsement, just my planner of choice). He literally wrote the book on New Year’s resolutions.

Hyatt identifies several best practices in his “primer on goal-setting.” Goals, he says, should be kept few in number, should be written down, reviewed frequently, and shared only with those folks who are actually committed to helping you achieve them.

He also says goals should be SMARTER. Many of us have heard of SMART goals, but Hyatt goes further, saying every goal should meet seven criteria. They need to be:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Actionable

• Risky

• Time-keyed

• Exciting

• Relevant

See how he fleshes out those seven criteria here. When articulating your neighborhood resolutions for 2020, try to make them SMARTER.

On behalf of all the Strong Towns staff, let me just say how excited we are to see what we can accomplish together in the new year and the new decade, to make our towns and cities stronger and more financially resilient. Let us know how we can help make you successful, and please share your story with us—and the growing Strong Towns community—along the way.

Good things are ahead.

What are your neighborhood resolutions for 2020? Share in the comments below!

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