What If Getting Involved Locally Was Actually Fun?

The Bottom-Up Revolution · Sep 29, 2026 · 18m

Getting involved in your city doesn’t have to feel like homework. Margaret Allen works at a bank and is part of Strong Des Moines, where meetings feel less like formal civic duty and more like a group of people genuinely excited about figuring things out together. That atmosphere has pulled her deeper into city budgets, council meetings, and conversations she once would have tuned out. It has also made the group more willing to borrow good ideas from elsewhere, including Strong Towns Chicago’s improv series, as they find their own ways to make local issues easier to talk about and more fun to…