Look Around You: You’re Not Alone
My favorite day of the work week is Thursday, because on Thursdays I get to do one of the best parts of my job as Strong Towns community builder: I get to be the bearer of good news.
Most of the work I do is helping people start and run local Strong Towns groups we call Local Conversations. A Local Conversation is a group of people in a particular place who are meeting to talk about the Strong Towns approach and then putting it into action. There are now 175 (!) of these local groups across the United States and Canada, and more are forming every week.
Which brings me to Thursdays…
Thursday is the day I email people on our email list to let them know a new local Strong Towns group has started up near them. For example, one Thursday I emailed people in cities and towns in British Columbia, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario. In all, 358 people on our email list learned there was a new Local Conversation near them and how to get in touch with the organizers. That’s 358 people who now know they aren’t the only ones where they live who care about building a stronger and more financially resilient city.
As of this writing, 93 new local Strong Towns groups have formed in 2023. That means I have been able to email more than 4,000 people this year with the good news that they are not alone.
“Look around you,” I say to local leaders in the early stages of starting a group. “You’re surrounded by other Strong Towns advocates. You just haven’t met each other yet.”
Our Local Conversations program simply wouldn’t be possible without our Strong Towns members.
It was Strong Towns members who gave us the opportunity to start tracking the first local groups that were forming and self-identifying with Strong Towns back in 2018. It’s Strong Towns members who made it possible for us to keep up with the explosion of growth in 2023. Around North America, Strong Towns advocates are banding together to push back against the Suburban Experiment, and the movement is picking up steam. We have published more than two dozen Local Conversation success stories this year—10 in October alone.
And it will be our Strong Towns members who make it possible for us to expand the Local Conversations program in 2024. This is critical because, in addition to the 175 communities that already have a local Strong Towns group, we’ve heard from people in 706 other communities who want to start Strong Towns groups, too. As Strong Towns community builder, those numbers are at once daunting and exhilarating.
If you are already a Strong Towns member, thank you for making the impossible possible. If you aren’t, consider becoming one today. You’ll be supporting the work of hundreds of local Strong Towns groups and thousands of Strong Towns advocates. And it may only be a matter of time before you get an email with some great news: you’re not alone.
John Pattison is the Community Builder for Strong Towns. In this role, he works with advocates in hundreds of communities as they start and lead local Strong Towns groups called Local Conversations. John is the author of two books, most recently Slow Church (IVP), which takes inspiration from Slow Food and the other Slow movements to help faith communities reimagine how they live life together in the neighborhood. He also co-hosts The Membership, a podcast inspired by the life and work of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, writer, and activist. John and his family live in Silverton, Oregon. You can connect with him on Twitter at @johnepattison.
Want to start a Local Conversation, or implement the Strong Towns approach in your community? Email John.