Bottom-Up Shorts: How This 4-Step Approach Can Transform Your Community
In this special episode of Bottom-Up Shorts, host Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Edward Erfurt, chief technical advisor for Strong Towns, to discuss a transformative 4-step approach to public investment.
They explore real-world examples of this approach in action, including the inspiring stories of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Chisholm, Minnesota. These stories illustrate the power of starting small, focusing on what's possible today, and engaging local energy to build something truly transformative over time.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06
Thank you for listening to the bottom up Revolution podcast. This is norm, and I'm the director of movement building for strong towns. I've met 1000s of strong towns members now, and after hearing their stories, I'm inspired to say to others, I've got to tell you about so and so well that will be the spirit of these bottom up shorts, quick introductions to the regular people doing really exciting things, even when they initially felt much like you do that such amazing things must be the domain of extraordinary folks who've never had a moment of anxiousness or self doubt. And so if you like what you hear, please let us know. And as always, take care and take care of your place. Now enjoy the episode. Hey, folks, this is a little bit of a different episode of bottom up shorts in which I'm going to ask Edward Erfurt, who's our Director of Community Action, to tell me about an example in Chisholm, Minnesota, of a community grappling with a very common phenomenon. The thing that prompted me to get Edward on the on the call is because we had a new member in our orientation call, and he shared something interesting about what happened in his community of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. They received a $50,000 grant to improve a parklet. The community said, hey, that's awesome. This is great. Let's figure out how we make this happen. And so the community leaders stepped forward, and they said, Okay, let's hire a consultant to redesign what we already have. And the cost for that was 150,000 which meant it was not quite the next smallest thing, and it was a missed opportunity, and it was another sort of perpetuation of the problem that we have that we just can't seem to nimbly, rapidly iterate on what we have rather than try to figure out ways to go for the big league item, the big, fancy thing that will knock everybody's socks off, but possibly not happen or take decades before it takes place. Edward then posted in our Slack something that happened in Chisholm, and I was like, whoa. This is, this is exactly the same. It's a part of a pattern. Let's talk about that. So tell me about Chisholm and also the fruitful outcome,
Edward Erfurt 2:08
yeah. So we have been working with Chisholm for the last two years through our Community Action labs. And one of the first struggles that was shared as part of the Community Action Lab, we asked the community, what are struggles? What's going on? What can we tackle? And they described that right between City Hall and the library is a park. It's a park that the librarian wanted to do story time in the afternoons in the summer out in this park, but the park has had the maintenance. It needed a little bit of a facelift. There's a mural in the back, and it just wasn't the place they wanted to bring the kids. And as a community, just like Sheboygan, they went and said, well, our first gut reaction is we need to go hire a professional. Let's go hire a professional to figure out what we could do in this park, because that's we when we have a problem, let's get a solution. So they had a special meeting, and they brought in this architect to kind of sketch out what their dreams were to figure this out. Similar story that you just described. The Architect went and designed a really fanciful thing. Frankly, many of the things shown in the sketch, tip, and I can speak as an architect, you know, coming from that background, things that weren't quite invented yet. So sound barriers, that were clear, earth moving, beautiful, artistic things, and then also provided them a scope of services, of what it would take to design that park, the design was going to be over $60,000 so in a community that already didn't have money to do something because they could barely maintain the park they had, they then went to this knee jerk reaction to do this type of park and do a design. So let's say they came up with the $60,000 the $60,000 would just give them a design. It would just give them a vision of what they could do. It doesn't even count to like the things they would need to build in the park. We went and asked a different set of questions at this group. We asked them, what is the actual struggle in this park? And the librarian said, well, the struggle is, is that there's an existing wooden table and benches that are really they're kind of mildewy. You can imagine, they've been out in the weather a long time. It's really not that inviting when we take children out. And you can imagine children, we want to make sure they're protected so that just isn't really great. There's some other things in the park. We want to get some landscaping cleaned up. And they had a mural in the back of the park that they didn't really know what it was. We came to learn that the mural was done in the 80s, and it was trolls. So just needed a little touch up. And we asked, what is the next smallest thing you could do as a community? We know you don't have a lot of resources, but just around the table here, what could you do? Well, we talked about a bunch of different ideas and and we then closed our session and left over the next 24 or 48 hours, things started to happen in town. The first thing that happened is, I think almost the next morning, people awoke and they found that the table and benches in the park had all been sanded down. Somebody got out in the park and sanded all this down to the bare wood, cleaning off all the junk on there, and then sealed it with some stain. That idea. Then when people started to find out that that had been fixed, they started to say, Well, what about the landscaping? Now, we started this exercise in the winter. So they said, well, in a few weeks is going to be spring, and the thing that happens in town in the spring is everybody splits their hostas. These are perennials that grow up. They're almost impossible to kill. They grow in shade and sun, and in the spring, because they're so prolific in the community, people split them and plant them other places. They swap them and get those out. They said, well, since we've done this, could we just ask for people to drop off those Hostas at the library and we'll plant them. Sure enough, they put a Facebook post out. And also, Hostas started to arrive. Not only the hostas arrive other plants. So they did a planting day, and they they planted the garden areas. Now that people had seen this and had been to the park and saw what happened to this table, we started to get reports of other park tables in the community getting sanded down and stained. It was being done. They didn't even know who was doing it. They were just citizens that said, Look, if that's all we need to do to make this better in our neighborhood park, let's do that in the park. They also had this mural that I talked about, the troll mural. As a community they talked about it. So look, we don't have any emotional tie to it. It's a little scary because the graphics aren't really to our liking, you know, well intentioned at the time, but not today. So, so what if we make a blank slate and start from there? Well, when they said blank slate, also in the members of the action team, so a blank slate would be a big white wall. So sure enough, as this is occurring, they went and did a big white wall, they put a QR code up, and they asked people, and if you click the QR code, what would you like to see on this wall? What could we do to represent our community? And it has led to small murals on the wall that it's kind of like a tapestry that, over time, is being filled in as people are describing what they want. Because now that they've gotten to this mode in Chisholm of saying, What could we do? What is something you could do right now in your community, as people come up with really good mural ideas, they empower them to paint the mural. So this small idea of, how do we get onto our park? How do we do this? They asked the simple question, what is the next smallest thing they could do? And this has really been, dare I say, contagious in the city is empowering local citizens to do that. So not only do we have a beautiful park between the library and city hall that the children can come out in the summer and do readings and story time in the park. People are taking that idea to all of the other community parks and Chisholm understanding it as their community, and they were applying that practice in multiple places throughout the city. The thing that also that's kind of there is that the ask for a grant from someone else, the idea of bringing a consultant in to figure out what to do in a park has gone to the wayside. It's not even being talked about because they were embracing these ideas, knowing that these are obtainable today. They don't have to wait for anybody. They don't have to ask for permission. They are taking small, simple actions.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 9:30
Oh, man, I love that in it, and it's so consistent with the strong towns approach to public investment. Observe where your community struggles humbly walk through a place or identify what it is that people are going through that's that first step. Second step, identify what is the next smallest thing that you can do to address that struggle. Third step, go and do that thing. Don't wait. Don't linger. You know, within 48 hours, allow, you know Sandman to enter, to repurpose a Metallica phrase like allow that activity. To take place, and for then the possibility of that action to then be repeated, or to find a new struggle, identify the next smallest thing, and to be able to go and do that. We actually wrote about Chisholm as well repurposing a part of their city spaces in order to provide for a small pop up business, for local barbers to be able to provide hair care services in the community. This is a part of what it takes to have a bottom up revolution really take hold. And the reason I wanted Edward on is to also be able to just highlight like we are hearing stories like this. We are connecting with folks. We're helping to coach people to do this. And so if you love what you hear, and if you're inspired to see this, take place in your community. Definitely step up. Take notice. Take those small steps, maybe buy some sandpaper and see what you can come up with with that. Thanks for listening to bottom up shorts.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Read more about the incremental approach to public investment:
“The Strong Towns Approach to Public Investment” (article).
“Starting a Local Business Can Be As Easy as Setting Up a Chair” (article).
“Learn the 4-Step Process for Public Investment” (Academy course).
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Edward Erfurt is the Director of Community Action at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.