Nominate Your Place for the Strongest Town Contest by Feb. 20!
Every year at Strong Towns we get to do this really fun thing: we run a contest to find the world’s strongest town. To be clear, this isn’t the perfect town or city that’s got it all figured out. (That place doesn’t exist.) The winner is a community that best exemplifies the process of getting stronger.
Only one town or city will emerge victorious in our Seventh Annual Strongest Town Contest, a bracket-based showdown modeled after college basketball’s March Madness tournament.
Through four rounds of competition, we get to celebrate a total of sixteen communities who are responding to local challenges—and addressing local opportunities—with creativity, intelligence, humility, and courage.
Does this sound like the city where you live? If you love your community—both for what it is and for what it aspires to be—you should nominate it for this year’s contest. Nominations are due February 20 at 11 p.m. CT. Plenty of time to complete a great application!
A photo from 2021’s Strongest Town: Lockport, IL.
The application/nomination process is very simple. There are no large research projects that need to be completed. Just get a small team together and provide a few short (250 words or less) written responses. Some of the incredible places that have already submitted 2022 nominations are Durango, Colorado; Brighton, Michigan; and downtown Santa Clara in California.
In 2020, Watertown, South Dakota, started a great run toward a win by talking about its culture of collaboration, community pride, fiscal responsibility and support for entrepreneurs in Round 1.
Last year’s winner, Lockport, Illinois, made a deep impression round after round. In their Round 1 questionnaire, we loved reading about the tangible steps the town was taking to improve walkability and bikeability, create diverse housing options, provide businesses maximum flexibility to weather the pandemic, and become more economically resilient.
Introduce the Strong Towns audience to your community. And, who knows, maybe we’ll crown your town or city the winner on April 8!
You can learn more about the contest and find the application by clicking the button below.
More articles about the Strongest Town contest:
(Cover image source: Unsplash, with edits.)