2020 Has Been a Crazy Year. Here’s How We’ve Adapted.

Some of the Strong Towns staff at Splitsville, the night that everything seemed to change.

When people look back on 2020, many will point to one particular date as the day the spinning world they took for granted seemed to slip off its axis. For me, that day was Wednesday, March 11, when I and most of the other Strong Towns staff were on a retreat in Orlando.

Strong Towns has been a remote-work organization basically forever, which makes our biannual, in-person retreats extra important...and extra fun. At least one retreat each year takes place at a Disney theme park. We do much of the work of the retreat while waiting in line for rides. Then, just when we need a break, it’s time to board Space Mountain or Pirates of the Caribbean or the Millennium Falcon. I hardly believed it before experiencing it firsthand, but this is an incredibly effective (and surprisingly efficient) approach. Plus, there’s a lot to learn from Disney Main Street. And the churros are good too.

Our plan was to go to the park on Thursday. We spent most of that Wednesday at our Airbnb, making our way through a packed agenda that included discussions on the Strong Towns strategic plan, some HR stuff, our articles and podcasts, our community-building efforts, and how we as an organization can enfold into our movement people from all points on the political and ideological spectra. This was also our chance to get to know three brand new additions to the Strong Towns team: Wanda Dziwura, Lauren Fisher, and Alexa Mendieta. That night, we had dinner in Disney Springs and decided to go bowling at Splitsville.

The coronavirus—which had been given an official name, COVID-19, only a month before—was certainly on our minds, but, for me at least, it was not yet front-and-center. That changed at the bowling alley. There were TVs above the bowling lanes, and, between frames, we watched one news story after the next about the gathering storm: the World Health Organization declaring a pandemic, the president instituting travel restrictions, the NCAA limiting attendance at events, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson being diagnosed positive in Australia. I was also getting text messages from my wife back in Oregon, and from the organizers of a conference in Indiana where I was supposed to speak that weekend.

Back at our Airbnb, we decided not to go to Disney the next day after all. (In fact, most of us changed our travel plans to fly home early.) Some of us stayed up late into the night talking about how Strong Towns could adapt to a landscape that was shifting in real-time under our feet. Not least, we wondered about in-person events. In normal years, a big part of the work we do to share the Strong Towns message comes from in-person events; they also generate about a third of our revenue. Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn does dozens of these events each year; board members and other staff do a few as well. But we could already tell that in-person events weren’t going to happen for a while...and indeed a few days later the CDC recommended against gatherings of 50 or more people.

Strong Towns Isn’t the Hero

We’re careful as an organization not to position ourselves as The Hero. Even during Member Week this week, when we’re asking people to help support the organization financially, we try to shine the spotlight on the people building strong towns and cities where they live. Our role is to support the real heroes and to help grow the movement.

I bring that up because the rest of this article walks a fine line. On the one hand, we thought it would be good to talk about how we as an organization have adapted to this wild year—a year dominated not only by a global pandemic, but also widespread social unrest after the killing of George Floyd and a tense presidential election. This accounting seems especially important for the sake of the Strong Towns members who support us financially. (I’ve thought about this article as doing the math on Strong Towns.)

On the other hand, I hope you can see what’s behind the numbers and milestones mentioned below: the thousands of people—literally, thousands—who are doing the daily, often difficult, frequently unheralded, but always vital work of building stronger and more financially resilient places. Knowing these folks are out there—meeting them at events; hearing their stories, struggles, and successes over email or in the Strong Towns Facebook group—does more than just keep us motivated: it also focuses our content, shapes the resources we create, and guides us as we try to connect advocates with one another across distance.

How We’ve Adapted in 2020

As you may know, the four steps of the Strong Towns approach to public investment are:

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.

We’ve done something similar as an organization in 2020. As the pandemic confronted towns and cities across North America with just how financially and socially fragile they already were, we at Strong Towns listened to and observed where people were struggling. (Part of our listening work was through a detailed survey, which yielded some surprising results, and an ongoing series of focus groups.) Then we asked ourselves: What’s the next thing we can do to help address that struggle? We tried to do that thing, quickly and well. And then we repeated the process. 

Strong Towns urges communities to take an incremental approach, one rooted in gathering feedback and iterating based on what you learn. We’ve tried to follow our own advice as an organization—listening, trying new things, learning, pivoting. Like you, we’ve had to be nimble. Here are some of the ways we adapted to 2020:

1. The Strong Towns Academy

The loss of in-person events, and its revenue stream, became the final push to do something we’d talked about for years. We created The Strong Towns Academy, a suite of online courses on core Strong Towns topics like housing, transportation, economic development, urban design, and more. The eight primary courses—two of which are available now, with additional courses rolling out every couple of months—are worth more than 30 continuing education credits. More than 150 people have subscribed to the full eight-course bundle. We also created a free Strong Towns 101 course that has been extremely popular, with nearly 2,000 people enrolled.

2. Free Webcasts and Online Events

Two weeks after returning home from Orlando, we offered our first free webcast. Additional webcasts followed, covering everything from incremental development and missing middle housing to parking minimums and “open streets” recovery initiatives. Presenters included not only Chuck Marohn and other Strong Towns staff, but also Joe Minicozzi, Gracen Johnson, Ashley Salvador, Quint Studer, and many more. We’ve done more than a dozen of these webcasts so far—many with follow-up Q&A webcasts of their own—sometimes for up to 1,500 Zoom participants at a time.

We recently started participating in online events as well, including virtual gatherings organized by groups in Maine, Florida, Virginia, Michigan, and elsewhere.

3. The Local Leader’s Toolkit

In May, we released our free e-book The Local Leader’s Toolkit: A Strong Towns Response to the Pandemic. What we were seeing was local leaders on the front lines of the pandemic response. These leaders were facing head-on one of the greatest challenges of our time, yet they had been left largely to fend for themselves by those in distant capitol buildings. The Local Leader’s Toolkit provided detailed next steps (in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term) for what leaders need to do to stabilize their communities and put them on a path to recovery. The toolkit has been distributed to many thousands of people—including everyone on the Strong Towns email list, attendees of a Toolkit-focused webcast, and those who downloaded it directly from our site. 

4. Kansas City Series

Earlier today we released a second e-book called Kansas City: The American Story of Growing into Decline. That e-book is the culmination of a yearlong series we did on the growth of Kansas City, Missouri and the impacts of its development pattern. Our series drew on the brilliant work of our friends at Urban3, who conducted a survey of Kansas City’s “fiscal geography”—its revenue and expenses, its street network and historical development pattern. What emerged is a case study relevant not only to people in Kansas City but to towns and cities around North America. Kansas City is a case study for the fragile-making effects of the suburban experiment. Yet as we make clear, Kansas City could also be a model for how cities can change course and start building stronger and more resilient places again. 

5. A New Podcast…and a New Podcast Host

In addition to adapting to the changes wrought by the pandemic, we’ve adapted to a few staffing changes as well. In late December, Kea Wilson left to join Streetsblog, where she is now Senior Editor. And in May, Jacob Moses left to take a new job as the executive director of the Denton Affordable Housing Corporation. In addition to their other roles for us, Kea and Jacob were the hosts, respectively, of Upzoned and It’s The Little Things, two of our three podcasts. 

We were incredibly fortunate to have Abby Kinney, an urban planner in Kansas City, take over as host of Upzoned. Since assuming that role in late February, episodes of the Upzoned podcast have been downloaded more than 76,000 times.

Last month, we launched a new podcast. The Bottom-Up Revolution features stories of the Strong Towns movement in action. Hosted by program director Rachel Quednau, the podcast consists of interviews with people who are stepping up to make their communities more economically resilient, as well as concrete action steps for how others can implement those ideas in their places. Five episodes have been released so far, with a sixth coming tomorrow. 

Including our flagship Strong Towns podcast, by my count we’ve published around 75 episodes so far in 2020. They’ve been downloaded more than 340,000 times.

Remember, the point of sharing this information isn’t to make us the hero. It’s to remind you that, even in the midst of a pandemic, stay-at-home orders, city budgets pushed past the breaking point, a contentious national election, and demonstrations and rallies in our city streets—in the midst of all that, people just like you are taking charge of their community’s financial future. 

We find this encouraging and we hope you do too.You are the Strong Towns movement...and the movement is growing.

6. Articles

Over the past 12 months, more than 2 million different people have visited our site. That’s a first for us. Those numbers are exciting because they are further proof that the conversation about how we build cities in North America is changing—and the change is coming from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. 

We are on track to publish more than 560 articles in 2020. More than sheer quantity, though, I’m proud that we’ve been able to publish articles that provided an authentic Strong Towns take on issues dominating the news and weighing on many hearts. In addition to articles about COVID-19 and its effect on communities, I was especially proud to hit *PUBLISH* on Chuck’s article making the local case for reparations and on Daniel Herriges’s election day article, “We Don’t Live in a World of Cartoon Villains.”

We are a small, lean organization. We strive to be good stewards of the resources we have. Not only the financial support of our members, but the resources of time and energy and attention as well. We don’t know what 2021 will hold…or the rest of 2020 for that matter. But whatever comes, we will continue to listen, to help how we can, to learn, and to try new things. And then we’ll do it again. This is how we build strong towns. It’s also how we want to be Strong Towns.

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