Staff — Contributors

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Mya Riley

Mya Riley

Mya Riley is the Copywriter/Editor at Strong Towns. She’s passionate about learning new things and sharing knowledge with others. In the past, that passion informed her work as a copywriter and researcher for an educational organization. Now, it’s drawn her to Strong Towns and its non-partisan, ground-level approach to improving communities through education and civic engagement.

In her free time, Mya enjoys hosting game nights with her friends and writing fantasy and crime fiction. You can usually find her going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, and she’s always ready with a fun fact about any topic, from ancient Greek literature to the physiology of sperm whales.

RileyStrong TownsApril 11, 2024Staff

Carlee Alm-LaBar

Carlee Alm-LaBar

Carlee Alm-LaBar is the Chief of Staff for Strong Towns. Carlee has become a champion for strong communities and civic engagement through her work in Lafayette, Louisiana. She has held senior leadership roles in local government and nonprofit organizations. When she’s not with her husband Will or dog Jozy, she spends her spare time volunteering with a variety of local organizations that build connections between people and empower local residents. Carlee graduated Magna Cum Laude from Northwestern University and holds a master’s degree in Public Administration from Louisiana State University.

Alm-LaBarStrong TownsFebruary 14, 2024Staff

Chris Allen

Chris Allen

Chris Allen is the Sponsorships and Partnerships Coordinator at Strong Towns. With a long career in operations, sales, and management, Chris brings a passion for collaborating around big ideas and seeing them through. He brings his enthusiasm for the built environment and community advocacy to our partners and supporters through the work of the Development Team. Chris is proud to work out the Strong Towns principles with our partners and donors—encouraging flourishing for all to positively impact our communities.

If you are interested in supporting or partnering with Strong Towns, please contact Chris Allen at chris@strongtowns.org.

AllenStrong TownsFebruary 7, 2024Staff

Liz Kirkpatrick

Liz Kirkpatrick

Liz Kirkpatrick is the Foundations Funding Coordinator at Strong Towns, where she nurtures relationships with our generous funders and grantees. Liz comes from a small coal mining town just outside of Wheeling, West Virginia, and has been involved in various arts and culture and revitalization projects within the surrounding area. She continues to be an advocate for her Appalachian community while living in Columbus, Ohio, after double majoring in Arts Management and City and Regional Planning at the Ohio State University. She has experience in major donor and sponsorship relations, coordinating large-scale events (such as the Dublin Irish Festival), curating public art pieces throughout the Greater Columbus area, and organizing funding for Ohio's robust creative sector. She also enjoys spending time outside among the trees and sun to read, exploring new places, and time spent with quality company.

Interested in speaking about opportunities within your foundation that align with Strong Towns' mission? Start a conversation with Liz at elizabeth@strongtowns.org.

KirkpatrickStrong TownsJanuary 17, 2024Staff

Karen Douglas

Karen Douglas

Karen Douglas is the Public Relations Specialist at Strong Towns. With an educational background in Architecture and City Planning, four years in nonprofits, and 10 years as a full-stack content marketer and PR specialist for small businesses and startups, she brings a well-balanced perspective to media and Strong Town concepts. Through data analysis and emotional intelligence, she’s passionate about forming lasting relationships, building win-win solutions, and creating campaigns that resonate with people.

Karen’s love for public relations comes from her love of travel, culture, and community building. In her downtime, you’ll find her browsing bookstores, record shops, and museums; building new “music to work/relax to” playlists; and discussing her favorite books, movies, and TV shows.

Are you a member of the media and want to talk about Strong Towns? Email Karen.

DouglasStrong TownsNovember 29, 2023Staff

Katy Kelly

Katy Kelly

Katy Kelly is the Social Media Coordinator at Strong Towns. “Very online” since her early youth, she is a nerd for all things philosophy and internet culture. In the past, she served as a web designer, creator, marketer, and host for a variety of digital media and event platforms. She fell in love with Strong Towns for its perspective on cities as complex adaptive systems and its work to bridge political divides to transform our places for the better.

Outside of work, Katy enjoys painting, music, dancing, and lively community gatherings. A native Minnesotan, she lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, with her husband and their little dog, Betty.

KellyStrong TownsNovember 28, 2023Staff

Allison Oliver

Allison Oliver

Allison Oliver is the Administrative Assistant at Strong Towns. Allison has worked in real estate for the past 10 years, with a focus on title insurance. She enjoys gardening, hiking, traveling, and patio season. She moved to Breezy Point, Minnesota, two years ago and lives in a cabin in the woods, surrounded by Forestry Service land. She’s passionate about food and cooking—from recipe creation, to picking ingredients, to spending three hours making a meal.

OliverStrong TownsAugust 3, 2023Staff

Lindsey Beckworth

Lindsey Beckworth

Lindsey Beckworth is the Curriculum Writer at Strong Towns. Lindsey fell in love with community activism during the eight years she owned a bakery in a small town with big potential in rural Georgia. As a passionate storyteller, she uses her journalism and copywriting experience to help Community Action Lab participants understand how they can apply Strong Towns principles, change the narrative in their communities, and create a prosperous future for the places they love. Lindsey lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her husband, Chris, and an ever-growing garden filled with dahlias and peonies.

BeckworthStrong TownsJuly 13, 2023Staff

Evan Pesch

Evan Pesch

Evan Pesch is the Web and Graphic Designer for Strong Towns. Raised in a household with a local historian and a city planner in Muskegon, Michigan (our 2018 Strongest Town Contest winner), he’s always found a way to tie his own interest in design and creative work back to the city he called home. After creating several projects to get involved in his community, he left to get a bachelor’s degree studying user experience design at the University of Michigan. He later bounced around as a designer, web developer, and artist for numerous organizations before returning to his hometown in search of new ways to apply his varied skillset to improve the city he loves. If you want to find him, just visit Muskegon’s Lakeshore Trail. He’ll likely wander by you soon.

PeschStrong TownsApril 7, 2023Staff

Asia Mieleszko

Asia Mieleszko

Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.

MieleszkoStrong TownsDecember 1, 2022Staff

Michael Pasternock

Michael Pasternock

Michael Pasternock is the Video Producer for Strong Towns. After graduating from the University of Missouri, he taught high school English and government in CoMo. Mike and his wife then moved to Arizona, making his side-hustle wedding filmmaking business his full-time job. Mike also worked as chief editor for several prominent YouTubers around the Phoenix area. After discovering Strong Towns and resonating with the message, he realized that his hometown of Chicago was a better fit for his family’s lifestyle. He now lives near the lake and loves to document his travels on camera, play board games with friends, and explore the many delicious restaurants near his lively neighborhood.

PasternockStrong TownsDecember 1, 2022Staff

Ben Abramson

Ben Abramson

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.

AbramsonStrong TownsNovember 30, 2022Staff

Tony Harris

Tony Harris

Tony is the Action Team Coordinator at Strong Towns. Tony believes incremental action and humility are key ingredients to community growth. Prior to joining the team, Tony worked in operations and communications with start-up ventures in the renewable energy and collaborative technology fields. His vocational experience spans across project management, process design, facilitation, fundraising, and organizational development. Tony holds a Master of Arts in Conflict Transformation from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. He currently calls Annapolis, Maryland, home.

HarrisStrong TownsNovember 28, 2022Staff

Edward Erfurt

Edward Erfurt

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.

Edward ErfurtStrong TownsOctober 4, 2022Staff

Norm Van Eeden Petersman

Norm Van Eeden Petersman

Norm Van Eeden Petersman is the Director of Membership and Development at Strong Towns. He is a skilled communicator of the Strong Towns message and a community builder. He leads DelPOP, a land use reform and housing advocacy group in Delta, British Columbia, and is a leader of the Strong Towns Toastmasters Club.

Norm has a Master of Divinity and a Bachelor in Political Studies. He spent 10 years pastoring churches in Canada as a preacher, teacher, and leader. He worked in communications for the second-largest city in British Columbia and carried out infrastructure-related stakeholder outreach for Canada's Minister of Health and Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario in Ottawa, ON.

Norm has published articles on housing, transportation, faith, and culture and his writing appears regularly on the Strong Towns site. You can connect with him on Twitter at @normvep or on LinkedIn.

Van Eeden PetersmanStrong TownsJuly 26, 2022Staff

Tayana Panova

Tayana Panova

Tayana Panova served as the Social Community Specialist at Strong Towns. She holds a PhD in psychology, with a specialization in how technology and psychology interact. Her research has led her to understand that technology is often used as an outlet for needs not satisfied by the built environment, which is why she has developed a passion for building healthy and vibrant communities. Her years living in Chicago and its suburbs, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Bulgaria, and New York have given her a unique perspective on different kinds of urban life. Follow her on Twitter at @DrTBPanova.

PanovaStrong TownsMarch 11, 2022Staff

Seairra Jones

Seairra Jones

Seairra Jones serves as the Staff Writer/Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. She currently resides between small-town Illinois and the rural Midwest with her husband, where they help manage a family homestead. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our towns stronger, you can find her outside working on the farm, writing fictional tales in a coffee shop, or reading in a hammock.

SheppardStrong TownsJanuary 31, 2022Staff

Grace Whatley

Grace Whatley

Grace Whatley is the Development Resource Specialist at Strong Towns, creating key resources, collateral, project proposals and grant applications that support specific programmatic initiatives and accelerate the mission of Strong Towns at large. Growing up in small-town New England, she is a proponent of strong rural communities and their innate relationships to the land around them. Prior to joining the Strong Towns team, Grace lived and worked in the remote desert community of Green River, Utah, where she facilitated an artist residency, managed small-scale downtown revitalization projects, and secured grant funding from private and public sources. She is also an artist herself, working variably in printmaking, drawing/painting, and ceramics. Grace now lives in Delta, Colorado with her partner, a cat and dog, a small collection of terrarium animals, and a large collection of rocks and houseplants.

Are you interested in strategically supporting the Strong Towns mission? Get in touch with Grace.

WhatleyStrong TownsDecember 1, 2021Staff

Karla Theilen

Karla Theilen

Karla Theilen is the Neighborhood Storyteller at Strong Towns. Karla is a writer, storyteller, and Registered Nurse based out of Missoula, Montana. Her penchant to explore wild places informed early career choices as a trail builder in the Grand Canyon, and a forest fire lookout in Idaho. Her current writing inspiration comes from a different kind of wilderness, navigating healing journeys with her patients in far-flung places where she works as a travel nurse. Her writing has been featured on NPR, and select stories and essays have been anthologized. She has been Facebook-free since 1972.

TheilenStrong TownsNovember 30, 2021Staff

Jay Stange

Jay Stange

Jay Stange is an experienced community development consultant, journalist, grassroots organizer, musician, teacher, and off-grid project manager. Raised in Alaska, his passions include transforming transportation systems and making it easier to live closer to where we work, play, and do our daily rounds. Find him shopping for groceries on his cargo bike, gardening, and coaching soccer in West Hartford, Connecticut, where he lives with his family. You can connect with him on Twitter at @corvidity.

StangeStrong TownsNovember 29, 2021Staff