A Strong Citizen in Los Angeles
Joe and his daughter and their bikes
We have a long time reader, early member and friend in the Los Angeles area named Josef Bray-Ali. In the early days of this site, his back and forth over our content was very informative for me. He's a really smart guy with a lot of deep insight from an area of the country I did not know well. As we've gotten to know each other, I've grown to be inspired by how he lives his life as an father, an entrepreneur owner of a bike shop and as someone active in the community. He's what I think of when I think of a Strong Towns advocate.
Many of you may remember Joe because of his story of getting back his stolen bike. The power of a community.
We also featured Joe last summer about why he decided to run for city council. We have a lot of Strong Towns members who ponder similar choices and we thought it would be helpful for them to hear Joe's thoughts.
I'm going to pause here and make an important note: Strong Towns is a 501(c)3 organization. We do not get involved in politics and we do not endorse candidates. I really like Joe as part of our Strong Towns conversation, but I don't know his opponent, the issues they are discussing or anything else concerning this particular race. I'm writing this article because I think the way Joe is going about incorporating our message into his community dialogue is a model we can all learn from, whether we are running for office or just chatting with neighbors.
So here's a video that illustrates Joe's thinking and how he sees his city through the lens of Strong Towns. It gets more core to our message as time progresses so stick with it to the end:
We have people talking about Strong Towns in communities all over the country. If you've got an example, please share it with us by emailing Rachel Quednau (quednau@strongtowns.org). We learn a lot from these exchanges about how we can present and frame things to best help you share our message with others. And we know that Strong Towns readers and listeners get excited and inspired to see the impact of this message in other places.