How Ordinary People Doing Small Things Can Change the World

It comes down to stewardship, empathy, and humility.

Note: This is an edited version of my opening remarks at the 2025 Strong Towns National Gathering.

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we change the world. That’s the challenge—and the inspiration—I bring with me today.

Last night, I sat down to prepare these remarks. I wrote pages of notes, but nothing felt quite right. I kept asking myself: What do I want to say to a room full of people I consider close friends? What do we most need to hear at this moment?

Here’s what I came back to again and again: We are called to change the world—but the tools we have are ordinary people doing small things. How does that add up?

It’s a question I’ve wrestled with lately, as our movement has grown and more people turn to us looking for answers, for a magic fix, for the three quick steps to turn everything around.

But that’s not how change works. There’s a harder, more meaningful path: doing the next thing. And the next. And the next. That’s the path I want to talk about today. Because it’s the only one that truly works.

To guide us, I want to offer three words, principles that define what we’re doing together.

Some of you have been to multiple gatherings—Tulsa, Minneapolis, or before. Others are brand new to Strong Towns. Whether this is your first or your fifth, I want to start by grounding us in what this movement is all about.

Stewardship: You Don’t Need Authority to Take Responsibility

Let’s start with stewardship.

Stewardship isn’t about authority; it’s about responsibility. Your city belongs to you not because you’re in charge, but because you care.

When you step into the void and say, “I care about this place,” you take ownership in a way the systems around us rarely do.

We've all asked the question at some point: Does anyone care? I know I did. In the early days of Strong Towns, it was just me, Andrew, and a few others, asking that very question. But clearly, people do care.

That’s what stewardship is: claiming responsibility for your place, not because you must, but because you love it.

Earlier this year, we released the Finance Decoder, a tool years in the making. A lot of brilliant people helped us shape it. It had to do something tricky: communicate complex, technical financial realities in a way that regular people could understand and act on.

And it worked. Too well, maybe.

What we found, over and over, city after city, was heartbreaking. Community after community facing financial distress. Not because they were uniquely mismanaged, but because they all followed the same broken model.

I had someone ask me recently: “Chuck, you talk about this Ponzi scheme model, but where’s the proof? Give me the scientific study. Show me the journal article.”

My answer: The proof is in the heartbreak.

We’ve modeled dozens of places. They all ended up in the same fragile financial condition. It’s not a one-off. It’s a pattern.

The Finance Decoder isn’t meant to shame. It’s meant to spark conversation. It says: “We care. And because we care, this is not okay.”

Take Strong Towns Columbus. They used the Decoder, filled it out, and brought it to City Hall. The city had plenty of excuses, but the conversation happened. It mattered. It opened a door.

That’s what stewardship looks like. It’s not just filling out forms or sharing data. Sometimes it’s something as simple as adding a bench to a bus stop. Like they did in Richmond, California. And suddenly, people smiled. There was joy and dignity.

When we see ourselves as consumers of a city—"I pay taxes, I deserve services”—we’re missing something. A city isn’t a product. It’s a place.

And when we see ourselves instead as stewards—when we bring care, purpose, and pride to our communities—that’s when we start to build. That’s when we begin to rebuild.

Don’t be afraid to own your city. Don’t be afraid to care when no one else seems to. Because if you do, you won’t be alone for long.

Empathy: Listening, Not Blaming

The second word I want to leave you with today is empathy.

Empathy isn’t just about caring; it’s about listening. It’s resisting the urge to impose our own top-down explanation of what’s going on, and instead working to understand the world as someone else experiences it.

Nowhere have I seen us struggle more with empathy than in how we respond to automobile crashes.

We all want someone to blame. We fixate on the “reckless driver.” Even in my own family, I hear this all the time. My wife will say, “There are so many reckless drivers out there today.” And she’s right, there are. But then we get in the car, and she’s doing 35 in a 30, and I say, “Hey, reckless driver… it’s you.”

We started the Crash Analysis Studio as a way to inject empathy into this conversation. To move away from finger-pointing—“Who messed up?”—and instead ask: How did this crash happen? How did these people find themselves in this situation? And what can we do to prevent it from happening again?

When we built the Studio, we transformed bureaucratic technical speak into everyday ways of understanding the built environment. And what we found—again and again—is that every crash involves a web of factors. There’s always something we can do to make things better.

But the most powerful part of the Studio isn’t the technical analysis. It’s the people who live in these neighborhoods—the people who walk, bike, and drive there—showing up and saying, “This isn’t safe. Here’s why.”

It’s that combination of neighborhood expertise and technical expertise that creates real insight. It’s what made our Beyond Blame report, released last fall, so impactful. The recommendations in that report aren’t one-size-fits-all mandates. They’re conversation starters. They’re tools for local leaders to build the kind of city they want.

A couple weeks ago, I spoke with a group of mayors. I’m convinced, if we want Crash Studios in every community, elected officials are the key.

Advocates are doing amazing work, but too often they hit a wall when they bring concerns to staff. The engineer says, “We’ll need an 18-month study. Then a grant. Then a few years before we even begin.” That’s not good enough.

But when we bring these conversations to mayors and city council members—the ones who’ve met with grieving families, who’ve heard from constituents desperate for safer streets—they get it. Immediately. And they want to act.

When we widen that circle of empathy, amazing things happen.

At Del Campo High School in California, students formed a club to do a Crash Analysis Studio for dangerous intersections near their campus. They gathered data. They made presentations. And then—this is the part that gets me—they invited their mayor, city council member, engineer, and police chief to listen.

These weren’t kids messing around. They were young adults, sitting in front of a room full of grownups, having a serious, clear, logical conversation about the safety of the world we built for them. And because they weren’t just another adult at the mic, they couldn’t be dismissed. The room had to listen. And it was powerful.

People sometimes ask me: Why haven’t you had Wes Marshall on your podcast? Why haven’t you talked about the book “Killed by a Traffic Engineer”?

I haven’t met Wes. I haven’t read the book, though I’ve heard good things. But I’ll be honest: The vibe of that title isn’t the energy I want to bring to this conversation.

Let me tell you a story.

When I was a young engineer, doing a summer internship with the Minnesota Department of Transportation, I looked up from my cubicle one day and saw the district’s senior traffic engineer standing against the wall, head down, tears in his eyes. Another engineer was quietly rubbing his back. I thought maybe his spouse had died. Or a child.

It turned out, an elderly woman had been killed turning left at an intersection they’d worked on. She was sideswiped.

I think it’s fair to say she was killed by the traffic engineering profession. But, if we’re going to tell that story truthfully, we also need to say this: That engineer cared. He was devastated. He wanted to save lives. He wanted to do better.

That’s why empathy matters.

When we show up with the Crash Analysis Studio, we’re not pointing fingers. We’re saying: Let’s make this better, together.

And when we do that, we can change everything.

Humility: Taking Small Steps with Open Eyes

The last word I want to leave you with today is humility.

At Strong Towns, we talk a lot about humility. It is at the core of everything we do.

It means admitting we’re still figuring things out. It’s the discipline to test ideas, fail small, learn, and adapt. It means leading with questions instead of certainty.

In my Curbside Chat presentation, I often share photos of my hometown, the little pop-up shacks that grew into modest buildings, that eventually became a town of brick and granite. These images inspire me. They remind me that strong cities aren’t built by grand vision; they’re built by ordinary people doing small things, one step at a time.

I was invited to speak at a U.N. conference in Geneva last year. There were people from every continent, speaking every language, dressed in ways that felt strange to a Minnesotan. And yet, everyone smiled. There was a shared sense of, “We’re all friends here.”

But I struggled with how to convey this idea—that strong communities come from humility—to people whose cultures and places I didn’t know.

So I told them a universal story. One that starts in a hospital delivery room.

When my daughter, Chloe, was born, it was just me and this beautiful little baby while my wife recovered from surgery. Those first moments were perfect.

But reality set in quickly.

She cried all night. She spit up on me. There were months of no sleep, days in a fog. Eventually she learned to walk. Then came the Friday donuts, the joyrides listening to music, the kid who thought Dad was the greatest guy in the world but who also threw fits in grocery stores and could never sit through church. Every phase was beautiful. Every phase was hard.

And it never stops being that way. That’s real life.

You don’t become a toddler without first being an infant. You don’t graduate high school without going through the awkward teenage years. There’s no skipping the struggle if you want to grow up whole.

Cities are no different.

When we look at our places with humility, we see that the problems we’re facing aren’t interruptions to progress, they’re the path to progress. We have to start small. We have to screw up, learn, adjust. There’s no shortcut.

That’s why we released our first Housing Toolkit this year, one of three follow-ups to “Escaping the Housing Trap.” These toolkits aren’t designed to provide grand solutions. They’re designed to help cities take the next small, thoughtful step.

Housing is one of the hardest conversations right now. Everyone’s got their big idea, their perfect destination. But few want to walk through the messy steps in between.

That’s why I find it so encouraging that we now have dozens of cities saying: “We’re not doing all six strategies yet, but we’re doing three. We’re working on four and five. We’re getting there.” Little steps, one after another. That’s how change happens.

Humility is baked into our entire approach. The first step in the Strong Towns four-step process is to humbly observe where people struggle. Then we ask: What’s the next smallest thing we can do to address that struggle? Then we do it. Right now. And then we repeat. Over and over again.

It’s a process grounded in humility, but also grounded in what we know actually works.

Later today, we’ll hear from Chris Arnade, a man who literally walks in other people’s shoes visiting places most of us overlook, experiencing the world from the “back row,” as he puts it. That’s what humility looks like in practice.

And this brings me to a conversation that’s been bubbling up lately: the “abundance” discourse. There’s a lot of good energy in that conversation. But there’s also a dangerous temptation: the idea that we’re smart enough to skip the hard parts. That we already know how this story ends, so let’s fast forward.

But you can’t skip to the end.

If your baby was born and six months later graduated from high school, she wouldn’t be a prodigy; she’d be a deeply broken human being.

Because it’s the phases—the frustrations, the limitations, the lessons—that shape who we become. That’s true for people. That’s true for cities.

In a world where arrogance has given us fragile systems, humility is how we will build resilient ones.

One Block, One Person, One Conversation at a Time

There’s a theory of power that says the bigger you are, the more gravity you exert, the more you can warp the system and bend it to your will. That’s how empire-builders think.

But that’s not the Strong Towns theory of power.

Our power is more like compounding interest. It’s quiet. It’s consistent. It’s the relentless force of doing one small thing, then the next, and the next and watching it build, day after day.

If you need proof this works, just look around.

This whole thing started with one guy in nowhere, Minnesota, writing a blog three times a week. That was it. No team. No budget. Just words.

Then came Andrew. Then more writers. Seth Zeren. Many others. Each one adding their voice to the conversation, doing the next little thing. And now? Now we’re in a room full of people who are ready—right now—to go out and change the world.

That’s the power of compounding action.

And if you think that the small thing you’re doing doesn’t matter… if it feels like no one sees it, like it isn’t adding up—it is. It’s adding up to something enormous.

Stewardship. Empathy. Humility.

These aren’t the values of empire.

They’re the values of people who love their place. People who listen before they act. People who lead without needing control—or even recognition.

That’s how we change the world the Strong Towns way. Not all at once but one block, one person, one conversation at a time.

And we are watching it happen, right now, in front of us.

Thank you. Thank you for being part of this. Thank you for showing up.

And thank you for doing your part to build a Strong Town.