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Revitalize, or Die. The only way to combat the effects of apathy is in fostering a sense of civic pride. I work with communities to help them move from a place of apathy to pride.
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10/16/2026

Your city isn't dying. It's undiagnosed. The Civic Health Workbook is out today, link in the first comment.

10/15/2026

You've sat through the meetings. You've read the plans. Tomorrow, you get something to actually write in. The Civic Health Workbook is coming!

Most days I like to share a bit of writing or a graphic I think will help you in your efforts to improve your communitie...
10/15/2026

Most days I like to share a bit of writing or a graphic I think will help you in your efforts to improve your communities. But some days I have to stop and reflect on how lucky I am to do this work.

Today, I am grateful.

Yesterday, I delivered the closing keynote at the Wyoming Stronger Together Conference, hosted by the Wyoming State Chamber of Commerce in Cody. Afterward, I grabbed lunch and toured downtown with Jennifer and Courtney from the Cody Chamber.

With the afternoon free, I visited Yellowstone National Park on my way back to the airport. It had been years since my last visit, and it was even more amazing than I remembered. Along the way, I saw elk, fox, bear, and quite a few buffalo.

After leaving the park, I stopped at a place dear to my heart. Before graduate school, I worked on a ranch in Paradise Valley and then spent another year in Livingston, MT. The town was everything I remembered, and I grabbed a drink in a couple of my old haunts.

It was the perfect day, and it reminded me how fortunate I am to travel the country, see beautiful places, and work with people who are passionate about the concept of place. Thank you to the folks in Wyoming for inviting me, and to everyone I've had the chance to work with so far. I hope to work with many more of you in the future.

I don't go into communities to give them another plan.Plans have their place. Good ones absolutely matter. But a plan on...
10/13/2026

I don't go into communities to give them another plan.

Plans have their place. Good ones absolutely matter. But a plan only covers so much ground, and eventually it runs out.

What I actually try to do is give community leaders a better decision making lens. Because a community has thousands of decisions to make every year. The municipal budget. Capital improvements. Staff time. Nonprofit mission statements. Volunteer projects. Zoning decisions. Code enforcement. All of it.

No plan covers all of that. But a shared lens can.

The question I want every leader asking before every decision is simple: will this make residents proud of their town? Will this make the people who live here healthier and happier?

That's the lens.

When an entire community, municipal government, nonprofits, local businesses, volunteers, starts running every decision through that filter, real change becomes inevitable. Not because of one big project or one great plan, but because hundreds of small decisions are all pointed in the same direction.

That's where the power lies. Not just in the plan. In the decisions we make every single day.

This week I wrote about the single most overlooked strategy in community development.Stop chasing outsiders. Start helpi...
10/09/2026

This week I wrote about the single most overlooked strategy in community development.

Stop chasing outsiders. Start helping residents make friends.

Full piece on Substack this week. Link in bio.

What ties us to our places is the people.We need roots. We need relationships. We need friends. We must surround ourselv...
10/08/2026

What ties us to our places is the people.

We need roots. We need relationships. We need friends. We must surround ourselves with people we care about and who care about us.

People become attached to their town when they have friends there. When they have friends, they fight for their town. They care about what happens to it. They show up when it matters.

This is why helping residents connect isn't a soft goal or a feel-good initiative. It's the most strategic thing a city can do. Connected residents maintain their properties. They support local businesses. They vote in local elections. They stay.

And when they stay, they bring others with them.

You want to save your city?

Help people make friends. Repeat indefinitely.

A house and a home are not the same thing, the name of it depends on your relationship with the structure. The same is t...
10/07/2026

A house and a home are not the same thing, the name of it depends on your relationship with the structure. The same is true when it comes to the towns where we reside. A municipality isn't a community until people know one another.

Fostering friendships is the simplest and most effective way for a city to endear itself to its residents. Not another planning meeting. Not another economic development initiative.

Just help people meet each other.

And this isn't just on residents. Local government, nonprofits, and local businesses all have a strong incentive to make this happen.

Cambridge, Massachusetts gives residents $300 and free Play Street Kits filled with games and equipment to host neighborhood block parties. Newton, Kansas runs a program called Fresh Air Connections where the city organizes block parties, provides activity kits, and sends city staff and elected officials to attend. Sugar Land, Texas lends out a block party in box kit called the Sugar Cube.

And in Greater Napanee, Ontario, a nonprofit called Napanee Connect just launched a Block Party Lending Program with one simple goal. As their chair put it: "We're hosting one big block party so we can help residents host a hundred more."

That's the idea. That's the whole strategy.

This is when people put down roots. This is what makes residents care. This is what shifts a town into a community.

Find a way to meet more people and find a way to get more people to meet more people.

The places we love to visit are often the places that are also the nicest to live.I am not talking about the seedy beach...
10/06/2026

The places we love to visit are often the places that are also the nicest to live.

I am not talking about the seedy beach towns of the world, built entirely around extraction and spectacle. Those places exist for the visitor and the visitor alone.

I'm talking about the places people fall in love with and start imagining what it would be like to actually live there. The walkable historic downtown. The charming neighborhood full of local restaurants. The town that feels alive because real people actually live and work there.

Those places aren't built for tourists. Tourists just show up because residents made them so good.

You can think of ten places like that right now. All of them have strong tourism. All of them have high quality of life. All of them have high property values.

Every single place that has put residents first is winning on every front.

The tourist trap wins in the short term and hollows out in the long term.

The resident-first town wins forever.

Regular old residents are way down the list of people we think about when running our communities.Big businesses drive m...
10/05/2026

Regular old residents are way down the list of people we think about when running our communities.

Big businesses drive most decisions. Especially those located in some other town. Because we love big businesses, we put to work a whole cadre of experts and give them the community keys to try and entice the big business folks.

Then comes the tourist. If they come to town, things are going to be real cool. So we put together another team focused entirely on what tourists want and how to get them to drop off their cash.

We go through enormous effort trying to get people to our towns. But the strange thing is, there are already a bunch of people that live there. Every town. You can tell because when you drive around you can see their houses and apartments. They have already made the decision to call your town home.

What if we made them a priority?

What if we treated them as well as we treat the out-of-towner?

Funny enough, the places we love to visit are the places that are also the nicest to live. The towns that put residents first are winning on every single front. Strong tourism, high quality of life, high property values, thriving local businesses.

It turns out, when you take care of the people who already live there, everyone else wants to show up too.

This week I wrote about the relationship we all have with our communities whether we realize it or not. And why some of ...
10/02/2026

This week I wrote about the relationship we all have with our communities whether we realize it or not. And why some of those relationships are toxic.

Full piece on Substack this week. Link in bio.

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