Kea Wilson serves as Communications Manager for Strong Towns. She’s based in the great city of St. Louis, Missouri, but she’s lived everywhere from Santa Fe, New Mexico to coastal Maryland to far northern Michigan. She became passionate about the question of what it means to build a better world when she was in college, where she volunteered at a co-op bike collective and studied (most of) the great works of western civilization, roughly in chronological order. She’s worked in community outreach and development for six years, most recently at a small independent bookstore where she coordinated a not-so-small author events series. She’s also an avid (if somewhat slow) cyclist, an armchair economics nerd, and a novelist.
How a Local Bookstore Can Make your Town Richer — in More than One Way
But what cities would be wise to do, I think, is to recognize the powerful neighborhood-wide effect of the independent bookstore model, and soften the ground for more small businesses operating, by their nature, on small margins and small bets.
January 9, 2019
Can We Help Save our Cities’ Infrastructure by Growing more Food?
When we talk about the economic benefits of gardening, farming, and otherwise fostering a comprehensive local food system, we usually bring up reduced grocery bills, import replacement, and even preparation for national supply chain disruption if our big agriculture model ever proves unsustainable. But we less often talk about the ways that plants—including edible plants—can double as green infrastructure that can take the pressure off the man-made systems we rely on to make our cities function.
August 10, 2017