The Bottom-Up Revolution
185 episodes - English - Latest episode: 17 days ago - ★★★★★ - 31 ratingsThis podcast features stories of the Strong Towns movement in action. Hosted by Tiffany Owens Reed, it’s all about how regular people have stepped up to make their communities more economically resilient, and how others can implement these ideas in their own places. We’ll talk about taking concrete action steps, connecting with fellow advocates to build power, and surviving the bumps along the way—all in the pursuit of creating stronger towns.
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Episodes
The Bottom-Up Revolution Is...Reaching Across Political Divides
April 21, 2022 10:00 - 29 minutes - 27.4 MBIt’s news to exactly no one that we’re living in polarized times. But Strong Towns advocates are doing their best to push back against polarization in their communities. In fact, it’s a core value of our movement that we work with people on all parts of the political spectrum, because we know that the change we seek across North America won’t happen without everyone on board. Today’s guests on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, hosted by Rachel Quednau, are doing the challenging but importan...
Carlos Alfaro and Jacob Pritchett: Reaching Across Political Divides
April 21, 2022 10:00 - 29 minutes - 27.4 MBIt’s news to exactly no one that we’re living in polarized times. But Strong Towns advocates are doing their best to push back against polarization in their communities. In fact, it’s a core value of our movement that we work with people on all parts of the political spectrum, because we know that the change we seek across North America won’t happen without everyone on board. Today’s guests on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, hosted by Rachel Quednau, are doing the challenging but importan...
Christa Theilen and Seairra Shepherd: Small-Scale Rural Farming
April 14, 2022 10:02 - 35 minutes - 33.1 MBWe have two special guests today: Strong Towns staff members Christa Theilen and Seairra Shepherd. Christa works as Strong Towns’ office assistant in our Brainerd, Minnesota, office and Seairra is a writer and multimedia creator based in central Illinois. But besides serving at Strong Towns, they both also work part time at local small-scale farms. Christa’s is a vegetable farm and Seairra’s, an animal farm. We invited them on the show to talk about their experiences in this vital industry:...
Robin Roemer: Stopping a Harmful Highway Project
April 07, 2022 10:02 - 32 minutes - 30 MBA few years back, we published an op-ed from a Strong Towns reader who was fighting a proposed highway project in San Jose, California, near his child’s school—mere yards away, to be exact. The highway expansion would make a key crossing—where hundreds of children and parents walked to the school building every day—extremely dangerous. It would also bring noise and pollution into kids’ classrooms, strip recreational land away from the school, and, as with every highway expansion project, co...
Strongest Town 2022: Jasper, IN
March 28, 2022 10:06 - 11 minutes - 10.9 MBWelcome to a special Strongest Town contest episode, featuring a competitor in the Final Four round of our competition: Jasper, Indiana. Our guest is the Director of Community Development and Planning, Darla Blazey. You can learn more about the contest and vote in this match-up against Yellow Springs, Ohio, by visiting strongtowns.org/strongesttown.
Strongest Town 2022: Yellow Springs, OH
March 28, 2022 10:05 - 20 minutes - 19.1 MBWelcome to a special Strongest Town contest episode, featuring a competitor in the Final Four round of our competition: Yellow Springs, Ohio. Our guest is the village council president, Brain Housh. You can learn more about the contest and vote in this match-up against Jasper, Indiana, by visiting strongtowns.org/strongesttown.
Strongest Town 2022: Norwood, OH
March 28, 2022 10:03 - 13 minutes - 13.2 MBWelcome to a special Strongest Town contest episode, featuring a competitor in the Final Four round of our competition: Norwood, Ohio. Our guest is a resident and board member of a local community development corporation, Alisha Loch. You can learn more about the contest and vote in this match-up against Durango, Colorado, by visiting strongtowns.org/strongesttown.
Strongest Town 2022: Durango, CO
March 28, 2022 10:02 - 12 minutes - 11.4 MBWelcome to a special Strongest Town contest episode, featuring a competitor in the Final Four round of our competition: Durango, Colorado. Our guest is Durango city planner, Bryce Bierman. You can learn more about the contest and vote in this match-up against Norwood, Ohio, by visiting strongtowns.org/strongesttown.
Rosemarie Rossetti: Designing Homes that Work for Everyone
March 17, 2022 10:01 - 27 minutes - 25.5 MBToday’s guest on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast is an expert in universal design: an approach to building spaces in a way that benefits both people living with disabilities and people who aren’t. After an accident several decades ago, Rosemarie Rossetti began using a wheelchair and she and her husband quickly realized the home they lived in would no longer accommodate her needs. After searching for a more accessible place to live and coming up short, they decided to build their own unive...
A Special Update Episode Featuring 4 Previous Guests
March 10, 2022 10:02 - 23 minutes - 21.7 MBToday, we're featuring updates from four guests who were on the show in the last couple of years. We’ll first hear from Marilyn Burns, who’s helping lead an effort to create a community laundry co-op in the Woodhill neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. We’ll also hear from Alex Rodriguez, a Strong Towns member who’s been involved in an ongoing process to help revitalize his rural town of Lexington, New York, through arts, housing, and small business. Next, we’ll hear from Sheleita Miller, ...
Shelley Denison: Using Communicative Planning
March 03, 2022 10:01 - 27 minutes - 25.4 MBShelley Denison is a Strong Towns advocate and city planner in Sandy, Oregon, a town that’s going through some challenges that should be very familiar to you: concerns about traffic and congestion, questions about what it means to invite more housing into your city, and more. As a city planner, Denison navigates these issues with a thoughtful and open mind. She’s been invested in clarifying, for instance, what allowing missing middle housing would actually mean for her community (more housi...
Asheville Bench Project: Building Bus Stop Benches
February 24, 2022 10:02 - 27 minutes - 25.2 MBThe Asheville Bench Project is a very grassroots, incremental, small-bet approach to making Asheville a little more livable, a little more people-friendly. Today’s guest is choosing to remain anonymous (find out why in the episode). He was watching his neighbors stand out in the hot sun, the rain, the cold, waiting for their buses at utterly neglected patches of sidewalk, with cars whizzing past, and not even a place to sit while they waited. So he took matters into his own hands and star...
Rebecca McQuillen and Rodger Kube: Forming a Community Land Trust
February 17, 2022 10:01 - 45 minutes - 41.9 MBThe Marlborough Community Land Trust in Kansas City has been stepping up to help connect more neighbors, especially low-income neighbors, with opportunities for homeownership and to ensure that those opportunities continue in perpetuity for future families, too. Community Land Trusts are a model for stabilizing neighborhoods while at the same time allowing low- and middle-income people the chance to build household wealth. This episode features Rebecca McQuillen, Executive Director of the M...
Donna Berman: Turning a Historic Synagogue into a Community Cultural Center
February 10, 2022 10:01 - 44 minutes - 41.4 MBWhat would you do in your community if you knew you couldn’t fail? That was the question guiding Rabbi Donna Berman as she looked at a crumbling historic synagogue building in Hartford, Connecticut. It was home to a small nonprofit on the verge of closing, but Rabbi Donna saw a future there and she knew that things could only improve from their current state. Hired on as executive director of the Charter Oak Cultural Center, she and a single volunteer board member started a small newslette...
De’Nita Wright: Community Power Through Co-Ops
February 03, 2022 10:02 - 27 minutes - 25.5 MBDe’Nita Wright comes from a family of activists, and has been involved with bringing neighbors together for cooperative organizing around affordable housing and food access in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the featured guest on today’s episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, hosted by Rachel Quednau. Wright is the founder of the Coalition of West Louisville Neighborhood Associations and also serves on the board of the Louisville Association for Community Economics. Both e...
Gracen Johnson: A Neighborhood Person
January 27, 2022 10:06 - 33 minutes - 31.4 MBGracen Johnson, a founding member and long-time contributor to Strong Towns, recently had that now-common experience of moving mid-pandemic—to Ottawa in Canada. Yet she’s found small but powerful ways to get to know neighbors and be a positive part of her neighborhood. Having a dog to walk regularly helps. So does observing what’s going on around her and finding ways to plug into that, rather than showing up with her own agenda. If you’ve heard of our "4-Step Process for Public Investment" a...
Gregg Lombardi: Collaborating for Neighborhood Revitalization
January 20, 2022 10:02 - 32 minutes - 30.5 MBIf you wanted to decrease crime in your neighborhood, what would you do? Say there’s a park where people tend to hang out selling and doing drugs, getting into trouble, and making the rest of the neighbrohood feel unsafe… Would you set up more police patrols? Install brighter lighting? Maybe cut down the bushes that protect the park from public view? These are all typical tactics that cities use. But today’s guest on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast tried something very different: He and th...
Andrea Marr: An Interdisciplinary, Incremental Leader
January 13, 2022 10:02 - 26 minutes - 24.3 MBAndrea Marr has had a fascinating career trajectory. She’s a nuclear engineer, she’s served in the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf, volunteered on a solar panel project in Nicaragua and now leads the city of Costa Mesa, California, as the mayor pro tem. She’s also a Strong Towns member. What’s the connection between these different roles and experiences? For Marr, it’s about wanting to serve something beyond herself. In her current position as city councilor and mayor pro tem, she’s dedicat...
Billy Altom: Helping Rural Residents with Disabilities to Thrive
January 06, 2022 10:01 - 36 minutes - 34 MBWelcome to the first episode of the The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast in 2022. It’s great to be back with you, and we’ve got an exciting episode to kick off the new year. Billy Altom is the executive director of APRIL, which stands for Association of Programs for Rural Independent Living. It’s a national nonprofit consisting of over 260 members from centers for independent living for people with disabilities, specifically located in rural areas. Altom has been involved in disability advocac...
Kirk Seyfert: Increasing Bike Access for All
December 16, 2021 10:01 - 26 minutes - 24.7 MBKirk Seyfert got his start in a church basement. As he describes it, he was just a guy who cared about biking and transportation access, and started noticing a need in his community of Salem, Oregon. Seyfert heard about some neighbors who were walking miles to their third shift jobs because they didn’t own cars and the city bus service shut down during evenings and weekends. He thought that access to bikes might make a difference for these guys, and he was right. That spark of an idea has s...
Beth Hoffman: Getting Real about the Cost and Value of Farming
December 02, 2021 10:01 - 31 minutes - 29.3 MBIn her new book, Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America, Beth Hoffman tells the story of how she and her husband moved onto Iowa land owned by her father-in-law and began raising cattle, goats, and growing various crops. But unlike many farming stories, this is not a romanticized tale of waking at dawn to gather eggs in your apron pocket and cooking a beautiful breakfast with homemade jam and bread, then heading out to the fields to weed your lush vegetable patch… Al...
Ashley Salvador: Building Gentle Density and a Grassroots Campaign for City Council
November 18, 2021 10:01 - 26 minutes - 24.6 MBAll week, we’ve been celebrating the thousands of amazing Strong Towns members who make up this movement. They are safe streets advocates in Hawaii and mayors in Pennsylvania and small business owners in Georgia. And if those references sound familiar, it’s because every one of those stories was featured on the podcast this year. If you’ve ever listened to the show and thought, “Wow I wish I could do what Mary or Chris or Haile is doing in my city,” you can! It just takes stepping up and com...
Mason Thompson: Saying Yes to Your City
November 11, 2021 10:01 - 27 minutes - 26 MBMason Thompson is a Strong Towns member and city councilor in Bothell, WA. But he’s not someone who’s been dreaming of running for office since he was a kid or anything. For him, it all started because he wanted some bike trails in the local park. That led him to the park board, and eventually, to an elected official inviting him to think about running for office. Mason is someone who has said "yes" to his community; he’s been a lifelong resident of Bothell, and he’s dedicated to making it a...
Tim Wright: Joining with Neighbors and Taking Action
November 04, 2021 10:00 - 31 minutes - 29.4 MBTim Wright is a long-time Strong Towns member and cofounder of a Strong Towns local group called ReForm Shreveport, based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Tim is an engineer who joined with some of his friends and neighbors to create this group out of a desire to make the best of the community’s assets, focus on the potential of Shreveport, and help young people like himself see that it’s a great place to live and stay. ReForm Shreveport has been very focused on action. They’ve cleaned up parks, p...
Rebecca Undem: Helping Small Towns and Their People Thrive
October 07, 2021 10:01 - 30 minutes - 28.4 MBRebecca Undem lives in the small community of Oakes, North Dakota, and does a lot of work helping her town grow stronger, and helping her fellow rural residents become community leaders. But we know her advice and insights will speak to you no matter if you live in a town of 2,000 or two million. In this conversation hosted by Rachel Quednau, Undem talks about the choice to stay in or return to your hometown; the connections, family, and traditions you get to experience when you make that s...
Rob Green: A Strong Towns Advocate and Mayor
September 30, 2021 10:01 - 33 minutes - 30.7 MBOn this week’s episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, we’re featuring a Strong Towns member and mayor of Cedar Falls, Iowa. In this interview with Rachel Quednau, Rob Green shares his journey from Coast Guard officer to neighborhood association president to mayor. He’s passionate about government transparency and accessibility—so much so that he held office hours in the local grocery store to meet with constituents. This discussion gets into the nitty gritty of updating some zoning...
Sarah Davis: Data-Driven, Community-Centered Planning
September 23, 2021 10:00 - 22 minutes - 20.6 MBThis week’s episode is a very special one because it features our summer intern, Sarah Davis, who just wrapped up her internship last week. She was a shared intern between Strong Towns and our friends at the data analytics firm, Urban3. (We heard from Cate Ryba, COO at Urban3, just a few weeks ago on this show.) Sarah was with us throughout the summer writing important stories that use the Strong Towns approach to development and finance, and make excellent use of Urban3’s extensive resear...
Austin Taylor: Using Tactical Urbanism to Make Your Town Stronger
September 16, 2021 10:01 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MBThis week’s guest on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast hails from Utah and he’s here to talk about a cool tactical urbanism program that is helping make streets safer with an incremental, resident-driven approach in Park City. Tactical urbanism is an approach to public space that involves making what we at Strong Towns like to call “small bets”: small, temporary projects that require little to no money to execute, which allow people to test out a new design in a public space. It might be ...
Chuck Marohn: Taking a Strong Towns Approach to Transportation
September 09, 2021 10:03 - 29 minutes - 27 MBMaking his debut on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, hosted by Rachel Quednau, this week’s guest is Chuck Marohn. He’s on the show talking about his new book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, which just came out yesterday. In this conversation, Chuck talks about what got him motivated to write this book and why productive, resilient transportation is such an essential piece of a strong town. He shares some personal stories about transportation chall...
Cate Ryba: Connecting Neighbors and Harnessing the Power of Fun
September 02, 2021 10:03 - 35 minutes - 33 MBCate Ryba is Chief Operating Officer and Planner at Urban3, a data analytics firm that Strong Towns has been partnering with for years. In this conversation, Cate talks about the important work of Urban3, which helps cities understand their municipal finances and take charge of their financial future through powerful visualizations. But the episode also features a conversation on Cate’s previous role as the youngest city councilor in her hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina, her experien...
Tiffany Owens: Paying Attention to Your City
August 26, 2021 10:04 - 36 minutes - 34.1 MBTiffany Owens is a Strong Towns member, guest contributor and member of the Strong Towns advisory board. She currently lives in Waco, Texas, but before that, she was going to school in New York City where she recently graduated from The Kings College. In this conversation on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast hosted by Rachel Quednau, Tiffany talks about the trade-off between big-city excitement, and possibilities for connection and community that can sometimes come more easily in a smaller...
Thomas Dougherty: Turning Alleys into Productive Space
August 19, 2021 10:05 - 34 minutes - 32.4 MBToday’s story is about alleys, specifically, how much potential and possibility they hold. While they’re typically just used as a place to park your car or stick your trash cans, alleys are also a space where kids can safely play, where flowers can grow, and, perhaps, where new homes can be built. That’s how Thomas Dougherty sees it. Dougherty grew up on a farm in Ohio, where he developed an early appreciation for, as he says, “getting his hands dirty,” and being a builder. Later in life h...
Wendy Streit: Using Public Art to Help Small Businesses
August 12, 2021 10:04 - 35 minutes - 32.9 MBLockport, Illinois—a suburb of Chicago—won our annual Strongest Town Contest this year, and we’re doing a special week of content right now to celebrate their win and explore some challenges the city is facing. One genuinely fun and compelling story that we heard about from Lockport involves rubber duckies. Huge, people-sized rubber ducky statues, actually. During the pandemic in 2020, leaders and residents in Lockport were watching local businesses struggle to stay open as activity downt...
Mary Jones: Taking Matters Into Her Own Hands to #SlowTheCars
August 05, 2021 10:02 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBThe story featured in today’s episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast is truly the definition of the Strong Towns movement in action. It starts with a Strong Towns member recognizing a problem in her community and then working tirelessly, persistently over a period of years to solve it. Mary Moriarty Jones is a native Hawaiian who lives in Honolulu. Her background is in civil engineering and real estate development, but she’s also a mom to five kids, and that’s really where this story s...
Jenifer Acosta: Giving New Life to Historic Buildings and Neighborhoods
July 29, 2021 10:05 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MB“Incremental development” is a term you might’ve heard if you’ve been following Strong Towns for a little while. This concept refers to small-scale projects like updating downtown commercial spaces or renovating duplexes; the main thing is that these projects are led by individuals or teams of local residents, not huge companies. So, encouraging and allowing incremental development is one of the single biggest things a city can do if it wants to become a strong town. Not only does this in...
Lauren Fisher: Building Family and Community Resilience
July 22, 2021 10:02 - 31 minutes - 29.5 MBLauren Fisher grew up in Alaska—both in the city and in a very remote, fly-in only region. Today she lives in rural Wisconsin on a burgeoning homestead with her husband. She has a dog, a cat, several rabbits and chickens, and will hopefully have goats or a cow very soon. Lauren is dedicated to building up household resilience, which, for her family, means trying to develop more and more food options that they can raise, grow, forage, and hunt themselves. But she’ll also be the first to tel...
Ilana Preuss: Saving Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing
July 15, 2021 10:09 - 26 minutes - 24.5 MBWhen you’ve got a friend or family member visiting you from out of town, where do you take that person? After you’ve said your hellos and they’ve dropped off their bags, where is the fun place you head to show them what your community is all about? Is it, by chance, a brewery, or the farmers market stand with the homemade cheese and sausage, or maybe it’s a cute jewelry shop on main street that makes all their own stuff… There’s something about a locally-crafted food or good that just ins...
Michael Kelley: Making Cities More Bike- and Walk-Friendly
July 08, 2021 10:02 - 22 minutes - 20.8 MBMichael Kelley is the Director of Policy at BikeWalkKC, an advocacy organization based in Kansas City, Missouri. Their mission is to “redefine our streets as places for people to build a culture of active living.” Michael sees biking and walking as tools that enable people to get where they need to go in a safe, affordable, independent manner. These active transportation options can improve economic resilience, health, and a sense of community in any town, and Michael is working towards t...
Nick Meyer: Shining a Spotlight on the Good That's Happening in Your Town
June 29, 2021 10:05 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MBNick Meyer started Volume One magazine when he was fresh out of college as a way to help show his fellow citizens of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the life and vitality happening all around them. Now, 20 years later, the publication has grown tremendously, and expanded into a retail space, cohost, and creator of many local events, and an all-around supporter of the Eau Claire community. Eau Claire, like so many places across America, has experienced a decline in economic activity and local pride ...
Haile McCollum: Small Business Owner and Community Leader
June 24, 2021 10:03 - 36 minutes - 33.9 MBStrong Towns member Haile McCollum is a successful small business owner, creative, and leader in her town of Thomasville, Georgia. In this episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, host Rachel Quednau talks with Haile about her ongoing dedication to her town through a number of activities and positions, especially local boards. We hear about Haile’s design firm, Fontaine Maury, which has, among other things, helped local businesses to sharpen their brand identity and make their mark in...
John Simmerman: Building Active Towns
June 17, 2021 10:02 - 31 minutes - 29.5 MBStrong Towns member John Simmerman cares deeply about community health and wellbeing, and founded the organization Active Towns to help cities think about and create more opportunities for physical activity within neighborhoods. But he wasn’t always an activist. For much of his career, John was in charge of developing wellness programs and fitness centers for large corporations. He brings that insight and experience into his Active Towns work today, creating podcasts, articles, and videos—...
Nathan Chung and Ryan Karb: Improving Food Access Through Mobile Markets
June 10, 2021 10:05 - 34 minutes - 31.8 MBIt’s a special week for us at Strong Towns. It’s our Member Week, where we honor and celebrate the incredible people who are members of this movement all across the country. You’ve heard several of their stories on this podcast in the past, and there will be many more to come. If this movement for bottom-up change and financial resilience has got you inspired to start taking action in your own community, it’s time to make your participation official by becoming a sustaining member of Strong...
Sophia Hosain: Composting for Community
June 03, 2021 13:29 - 30 minutes - 28.4 MBIn today’s episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, we’re talking with Sophia Hosain, who’s helping to lead a community composting initiative headed up by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a long-time friend and partner of the Strong Towns movement. Right about now, some of you are probably very excited to hear more, while others are thinking, “What the heck does compost have to do with building strong towns?” As Sophia explains in this conversation with Strong Towns Program Direc...
Coté Soerens: Creating a Coffee Shop for the Whole Neighborhood
May 27, 2021 10:02 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MBIf you heard that a new coffee shop was opening in a lower-income neighborhood, what would be your reaction? In most bigger cities and plenty of smaller ones, the coffee shop is a universal symbol for gentrification. It means that this neighborhood has been designated as the new trendy hotspot and rents are about to go up. At Strong Towns, we’ve been having an ongoing conversation about the meaning of the term “gentrification” and the complex story behind this concept that is so often overs...
Jeanyll Morris: Empowering Young People to Rebuild Homes
May 20, 2021 10:02 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MBA few months ago, we came across an article about a fascinating and unique program where lower-income kids in Birmingham, Alabama, were learning home renovation and building skills as part of their high school education. This wasn’t just about learning construction skills, though, it was also about lifting up and revitalizing the neighborhood where they lived. The school program is called Build UP and this episode of the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast features an interview with Jeanyll Morris...
Marilyn Burns and Leah Ross: Starting a Community Laundry Co-op
May 13, 2021 10:04 - 23 minutes - 21.8 MBYou might be familiar with food co-ops or housing co-ops. But how about a laundry co-op? A group of community members in the Woodhill neighborhood of Cleveland are starting just that. Marilyn Burns and Leah Ross are part of a group of residents who, through surveys and outreach, learned that a majority of their neighbors do not have access to a nearby washer or dryer. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s such a fundamental and basic component of human dignity. Being able to show up at ...
Charles and Whitney Coats: Promoting More Housing, More Options, More Access
May 06, 2021 10:04 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBStrong Towns members Charles and Whitney Coats are a husband and wife duo doing important work to increase housing opportunities in their home state of Texas. After spending two years in the Peace Corps in the Republic of Georgia (where they saw firsthand what it was like to live in a walkable, traditionally-designed neighborhood) to working for Habitat for Humanity today (where they help neighbors who wouldn’t otherwise be able to to access homeownership), Charles and Whitney are passionat...
Mayor Chris Frye: Shifting Perceptions About a Rust Belt City
April 29, 2021 10:03 - 32 minutes - 29.9 MBThis week’s Bottom-Up Revolution podcast features Mayor Chris Frye, who’s been leading the city of New Castle, Pennsylvania, since January 2020. Before running for mayor, his background wasn’t in politics but in social work and community service. He’s a husband and father of three—and he’s utterly dedicated to helping his city grow stronger. He’s also New Castle’s first black mayor, and a Republican. New Castle, as you’ll learn from Mayor Frye, is a city going through the same challenges ...
De'Amon Harges: A Roving Listener
April 22, 2021 10:03 - 25 minutes - 23.8 MBThis week’s Bottom-Up Revolution podcast guest is De’Amon Harges. Based in Indianapolis, Harges’ work focuses on deep listening and asset-based community development. He’s the executive director of a nonprofit called The Learning Tree, a board member of the Grassroots Grantmakers Association, recent recipient of Wesleyan Investive’s Tom Locke Innovative Leader Award, and a member of the Parish Collective. Perhaps the best way to describe him, though, is by his title, “the roving listener.” ...
Lisa Leslie: Building a Cohousing Community
April 15, 2021 10:03 - 31 minutes - 29.4 MBThis week’s Bottom-Up Revolution podcast guest is Lisa Leslie, who helped lead an effort to create a cohousing community with 11 families in Silverton, Oregon. Lisa and her husband went from living with two other families (including Strong Towns Content Manager, John Pattison’s family) in a cooperative house, to dreaming of building a full-fledged cohousing community, to seeing that dream come to fruition this past year. Cohousing is a term that really applies to the way most humans live ar...