A Lesson from the Amish about Building a Strong Town

Image via Randy Fath on Unsplash.

Last week I read an anecdote about an Amish farmer who was plowing a field with a young friend. The time came to give the horses a rest. After getting them settled, the farmer and his friend walked up a nearby hill where they would rest too.

At the top of the hill, they looked down and saw 13 other farmers plowing on neighboring farms. The Amish man told his friend that seeing all those other farmers was a reminder that if anything happened to prevent him from finishing his work, his neighbors would make sure it got done. And it would get done not out of begrudging “charity,” but out of the neighborly obligations of culture and community. Neither would anyone be keeping a ledger of how much time and equipment they’d put in working on their neighbor’s land. The Amish farmer gave this description of community:

“Where no one is done until everyone is done. Done is done. There’s no accounting.”

I’m usually wary of the veracity of stories that paint the Amish in a pastel hue. Not because I have too little respect for that community, but because I have so much. Yet this anecdote rings true with what I know about the Amish. Moreover, it appeared in Farming, a wonderful magazine co-founded and co-edited by an Amish family I met last year.

The story is also consistent with my own experience growing up in close-knit agricultural communities in Kansas. My family wasn’t a farming one. My dad was an air-traffic controller and my mom owned The Restaurant—the town’s only restaurant. Each summer I watched the farmers working together to make sure everyone’s wheat got harvested on time. They rolled their big combines from one field to the next, and they kept going, because no one was done until everyone was done. (The Restaurant’s role in all this was to make stacks of boxed lunches and deliver them out to the fields.)

Why do I bring all this up here? Because when I read that story, it actually reminded me of the Strong Towns movement—the thousands of people across North America who are doing the work of building stronger, more financially resilient places. The Amish farmer said, “There’s no accounting.” Of course, here at Strong Towns, we believe accounting is important. Not in the negative sense the Amish man referred to—keeping a ledger of begrudging “generosity,” with the intention of cashing it in when you need a favor—but in this sense: When evaluating infrastructure spending and other budget decisions, we need local leaders to #DoTheMath. It’s actually the neighborly thing to do. Towns and cities pursuing an approach to growth that leads to decline, fragility, and perhaps even bankruptcy don’t actually work. They don’t work for all the people living there now, and they certainly don’t work for the future generations who will inherit them.

Our plan for strengthening our places is to humbly observe where our neighbors are struggling, and then do the next smallest thing we can to address those challenges. Put another way, we’re not done until “everyone is done.” Paradoxically, that means the work of building a Strong Town is actually never finished; this is work—and principles and practices—that we pass on to the next generation. Ultimately, the work of building a Strong Towns is culture-making work.

Taking the long view ends up being liberating rather than frustrating. It reminds us not to pursue silver-bullet projects that may help us move ahead, but usually result in setting us two steps back. The long view also gives us the freedom to pursue instead incremental steps we can learn from and which compound over time and across place. This is captured in the Strong Towns approach. Here’s what we mean by that:

We believe that in order to truly thrive, our cities and towns must:

- Stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience
- Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn
- Stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous  adaptation
- Stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today
- Stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances

This is a radically new way of thinking about the world. Yet it’s also rooted in time-tested best practices and a kind of perennial wisdom. So the work goes on. We’re grateful for the chance to do it alongside you. Let us know how we can help.

Cover image via Sue Hughes on Unsplash.

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