Starting the Strong Towns Conversation With Elected Officials
(Source: Unsplash/Medienstürmer.)
Talking with your local elected officials is more important than you know—and it’s easier than you think. If the Strong Towns message of effective, transparent local government resonates with you, here’s some help for turning your interest into advocacy.
Our 2023 Local-Motive Tour—a series of 10 online sessions designed to help you take action and build a stronger town or city—will include a session called “Starting the Strong Towns Conversation with Elected Officials.” It will be hosted by Strong Towns Director of Membership and Development Norm Van Eeden Petersman, and Isaac Gonzalez, a Strong Towns member and neighborhood association president in Sacramento, who has been an outspoken advocate for safe streets after a tragic car crash in his community (and his advocacy has resulted in real change). Join Petersman and Gonzalez for their live discussion on September 21 at noon CT.
If you’re just getting started in your advocacy journey, check out this excellent guide from Strong Towns guest author John Reuter. Here are some excerpts from his step-by-step instructions on how to make effective contact, and effect change:
Don’t just go to meetings, set one up.
Attending public meetings is important and showing up (especially if you bring a dozen of your neighbors with you) can be a powerful way to demonstrate the need for change. But if you want to change minds, ask for a personal meeting. In a small town, this could mean asking an elected official to coffee. In a bigger city, it may be setting an appointment with their staff.
Tell your story.
You don’t need to be a policy expert to be persuasive. Your story can help an elected official understand not just what you want done, but also why it’s so important to you. Talk about your family, your neighborhood, your customers: What is the concrete problem people are facing that this elected leader can help solve?
Ask questions and listen to the answers.
Talk no more than half the time in your conversations with elected leaders. It’s equally important to learn what motivates them, how they are thinking through a particular issue, and whose advice they follow. Come prepared with questions to get them talking.
Make a specific ask.
Know what you want this specific elected official to do and ask him or her to do it. This may be to cast a vote or talk to another elected official or visit your neighborhood to see what you’re talking about firsthand. It’s important to be specific about the action you want taken, to ask, and to listen to the answer.
Sign up now for our 2023 Local-Motive Tour to learn more about effective communication, and find other informative sessions about core Strong Towns campaigns.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.