2020 Strong Towns Annual Report

We all lived through history together last year. The pandemic. Social unrest. The presidential election. They say hindsight is 20/20, but the year 2020 turned out to be a year we will look back to, not from. A lot changed—yes—but it was also a year that threw into sharp relief what already was but had previously gone unnoticed, ignored, or dismissed.

For us at Strong Towns, 2020 made visible much of what we’ve been talking about for more than a decade. And not just the bad—the fragility of complicated, top-down systems and the fragile-making consequences of the Suburban Experiment—but also the good: neighbors stepping up for neighbors, local leaders stepping up to lead, local communities stepping up to give businesses, front-line workers, and residents a fighting chance. Just a few days after the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn wrote an article called “We’re about to witness the best humans have to offer.” And we did.

Like every nonprofit organization, Strong Towns had to adapt in 2020. (You can read more about how we adapted here.) We tried to help as much as we could. We used our articles and podcasts (more than 500 in all), as well several free ebooks and toolkits, to address 2020’s challenges through a Strong Towns approach. Unable to travel for events we also created webcasts and online courses to meet people where they were at—which, for a lot of folks, was at home.

That’s what Strong Towns the organization was up to. In the meantime, Strong Towns the movement—that’s all of you—was out building stronger and more financially resilient communities. Strong Towns advocates have been busy helping their towns and cities navigate multiple crises, doing the math on infrastructure spending, advocating for bike lanes, slowing the cars, planting street trees, helping entrepreneurs, strengthening local food systems, and so much more. A few of these stories are highlighted in the 2020 Annual Report, and a few more are being collected here...but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Something else was made plain last year: that Strong Towns has the most incredible members. What makes our work possible is a broad base of support from our members and donors. Our funding approach might be described as antifragile. We don’t rely on one big source of support—grants, a special event, a single major donor—but rather a large number of members (nearly 3,000 in all), most giving less than a hundred dollars a year. Leading up to our spring member drive, unemployment was skyrocketing and the U.S. economy was teetering. We were prepared for contributions to go down, as people, understandably, held on to their hard-earned money in the face of the Unknown. Instead, contributions went up and it was one of our best member drives ever. We were blown away. We’re so fortunate.

This is your movement. And it’s making a difference. Strong Towns content reached more than 2 million people last year. You did that. Strong Towns was cited on the floor of Congress last year. You did that. Candidates advocating for a Strong Towns approach to growing financially resilient cities were elected at every level of government. You did that. All around North America, the conversation about how we build and grow our towns and cities is changing. You’re doing that. And we couldn’t be more grateful.