Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Earlier this week, Strong Towns’ bookkeeper Linda Twillman shared images from her run with the rest of the staff in Slack. With sunny skies and temperatures in the 60s, the weather on Edisto Island looked pretty wonderful to those of us in colder, rainier climes.
Each week, the Strong Towns team shares their favorite links—the things that made us think in new ways, delve deeper into the Strong Towns mission, or even just smile.
Well, it’s been a wild ride of a week. If you were too busy refreshing news sites to visit StrongTowns.org until now, you may have missed a few important and relevant pieces we shared this week. First, on Election Day, we published “We Don’t Live in a World of Cartoon Villains,” by Daniel Herriges, who discusses the essential need to push through “the fog of mutual incomprehension” and truly understand people who think differently from us.
Second, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Chuck Marohn popped in with a short reflection on the power of local action—which has so much more potential to make a real difference in peoples’ lives than an obsession with whoever’s in the White House. “We can spend the next four years as bit players in the next national contest, a race that each of us individually has little chance to influence,” he writes. “Or, we can shift the ground in this country by demonstrating a different way of doing things, working together with people in each of our places and in coordination with others across the entire nation.”
Whatever the coming days and weeks bring, we hope you carry that with you and stay committed to bottom-up, local Strong Towns action.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Lauren: I thought that this episode of Radiolab contained the most perfect love story that was, is, or ever will be when I heard it in the summer of 2017. It’s the story of Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, a writer and an astronomer, who helped write a love note about Earth and fling it into space on the twin Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Both are still sending information back to us from more than 10 billion miles away, even as they carry the recorded greetings of 55 languages; the sounds of laughter, a heartbeat, and a mother’s kiss; Louis Armstrong’s Melancholy Blues; and more snapshots of the essence of humanity on Earth in the late 20th century out into the universe.
Daniel: This essay in The Point magazine, “On Integration,” is not light or short reading, but I found it a fascinating and worthwhile analysis of what it might look like to meaningfully address America’s longstanding racial disparities and unequal power structures—and, equally importantly, what it likely won’t look like. The authors are skeptical of the handful of bestsellers that purport to change (mostly) white hearts and minds by teaching readers how to reflect on their own racism—a list of books by authors like Robin DiAngelo whose mantras seemed to dominate social-media armchair activism this year. The essay is at its most compelling when it begins to describe the alternative: a program of empowering Black communities to address their own urgent issues from the bottom up, “which has the advantage of depending neither on the generosity nor the moral enlightenment of whites.... Integration, in this vision, is not the dream of moving into a crumbling or—as it was once famously said—a burning house. Neither does it mean burning the house down. It is a vision of carpenters who show up with their own tools and their own blueprints, ready to build the house we can all live in together.”
The instructor of my Neighborhood Revitalization course in grad school liked to say, “Knowledge is not power. Power is power.” It strikes me as an important lesson and one I see reflected here.
Rachel: Nuns are the best. Maybe it’s easier for me to say that because I didn’t grow up in a Catholic school with a formidable nun presence, but I have had the privilege of getting to know several nuns and monks (both Christian and Buddhist) during my last few years in Divinity School, and I am always awed by their powerful, unique dedication to both holiness and humanity. This story about a group called Nuns and Nones (a collective of religious sisters and nonreligious young people) encouraging people to vote and keeping spirits up at polling places was a spot of joy on Election Day.
Michelle: Last week Chuck did a Curbside Chat presentation hosted by Big Sky Commerce and the Montana Associated Technology Roundtable for a nation-wide audience… especially those in the great state of Montana. Here’s a link to the recording.
John: Advocates in Toronto say the homeless there are facing a “catastrophic” winter. Not only is the number of unhoused expected to rise as people lose jobs and are evicted, many people may live outdoors because of concerns about COVID spreading in Toronto’s crowded shelters. One carpenter is doing what he can to help, building insulated, mobile shelters. Though they cost more than $1,000 per shelter to build, he’s giving them away for free and raising funds to help cover the cost. “It just seemed like something I could do that would be useful because there’s so many people staying in tents,” the carpenter, Khaleel Seivwright, said. “I’ve never seen so many people staying outside in parks, and this is something I could do to make sure people staying outside in the winter could survive.”
Technically, the mobile shelters haven’t been approved by the city, but Seivwright is undeterred: “This is what I know how to do, this is what seems to be viable, so I’m going to continue to do this.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Matthew Burke, Courtney Campbell, Nick Flynn, Stephen Heaney, Greg Holm, Charles F. Lehman, Christoph Maier, Greg McConkey, Brady Moore, Trung Dung Nguyen, and Kyle Ramer.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments.