Best Practices and Bright Ideas for Renewing American Communities

Downtown Silverton, Oregon. Image credit: John Pattison

When you’re doing community work it can feel like you’re on a journey alone. But James and Deborah Fallows—authors of the New York Times bestseller Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America—have proven this is far from true. In fact, when they set out to explore America in a single-engine prop plane they found out that renewing and revitalizing communities isn’t something that’s just happening randomly. It’s a nationwide movement.

I recently spoke with James and Deborah Fallows as part of my Busy Leader’s Podcast series (click here to listen). As they were talking about the good things they see happening in cities and towns across America, I started thinking how great it would be if the movement they explored in their book—and will dig deeper into in their upcoming HBO documentary—could generate an official way to collect and share best practices.

Every time I talk to a community, I am amazed at all the little things they’re doing to revitalize themselves that have a big impact. If we could get all these great ideas in one place so towns and cities could access them, we’d all be able to move a lot faster.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the Strong Towns framework—valuing resiliency over efficiency, taking a “small ball” approach to growth, making improvements based on how places actually work and what citizens actually need—is a great starting point. And the Fallows’ work is another layer of knowhow that complements and expands on the repository of ideas and best practices Strong Towns has already collected.

It’s exciting to think about the possibilities, especially right now. The tough times we’re all facing mean that home matters more than ever. We need strong, healthy, economically sound communities to help us feel grounded, protected, and empowered.

After my discussion with James and Deborah I sat down and sketched out some of the principles leaders and citizens of successful cities and towns live by. These are based on this podcast and other conversations I’ve had with them over the years:

1. Positive change requires civic patriots.

When James and Deborah would ask, “Who makes things happen here?” people had a ready answer. The answer varies: It may be a mayor, or a local business leader, or a real estate developer, or a university president. The faster people came up with an answer, the better off the town was.

2. Collaboration creates synergy and trust.

Thriving towns have lots of people working together. This is true at a high level like public/private partnerships. It also happens on a more “micro” granular level like businesses on Main Street getting together to attract customers (i.e., “You supply the beer and we’ll supply the music.”). There’s lots of networking going on. People don’t just know each other; they know how to work with each other. What this creates is a kind of synergy and trust. 

3. If you want your town to thrive, give institutions space to innovate.

In thriving towns, when James and Deborah asked about schools, community colleges, libraries, arts commissions, and so forth, there were typically a lot of creative things going on.

4. Training and education aren’t just “nice to haves.” They’re “must haves.”

The strongest communities are those that realize people don’t intrinsically have the skills to revitalize a community. They invest in teaching these things, whether it’s leadership training or civic education, such as Pensacola does with its CivicCon speaker series. People don’t know how to ride a bike or drive a car until they’re taught—being great citizens is something people can learn to do and become better at as well.

Pensacola, Florida. Image credit: Flickr user Don Barrett

5. The best citizens don’t just consume. They create.

During the podcast, James and Deborah talk about how they got a note from somebody who had worked for Google in the San Francisco Bay Area and had decided to move to a small town in Texas. The note said that if you want to consume a great community, you can live someplace like San Francisco. But if you want to create a great community, you can come to some place like this city in Texas. It’s an attitude; people know it’s up to them to build that town.

6. Be a good neighbor even when you disagree.

People in these thriving small towns act like neighbors even if they have different viewpoints from those around them. They know they must work with these people every day and see them in the grocery store or school meetings, so they’re on their best behavior. (This is so important in a time of divisive national politics. Better to focus on practical problems that can be solved locally.)

7. Local journalism still matters.

Thriving towns know that quality local reporting is very important. They find ways to keep it going at a time when so much local media is eroding. Positive messaging is a big part of creating vibrancy. To read an earlier article I wrote on this subject for Strong Towns, click here.

8. Openness attracts people and drives growth.

The best, most successful cities realize if a city is going to grow in the long run, it has to attract new people. It has to convince the young people growing up there to stay. And so they’re taking steps to make people of different backgrounds, ages, political views, and orientations feel that this could be “their” place. People can live and work anywhere now. Smart cities realize this and make themselves open.

While revitalization movement has been happening for a while, James and Deborah say the COVID-19 pandemic has created a new sense of urgency. In the midst of all the chaos, it has become increasingly clear that we can’t wait for outside or top-down solutions. We need to fix things ourselves on the local level.

I’d love to start the process of collecting your best practices and bright ideas for renewing communities. Please send them to me at quint@quintstuder.com. I always love to hear from readers—and now, more than ever, your enthusiasm and creativity matter!

James Fallows and Deborah Fallows will also be featured speakers at EntreCon, our virtual business and leadership conference, which will be held Wednesday and Thursday, November 18-19, 2020. (Click here to register.)

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