Fiscally-informed planning, design, and community engagement to cultivate strong neighborhoods.
Does your city always seem to have more needs than available resources?
Our workshops help city leaders diagnose, understand, and explain their city’s financial situation—and get a clear idea of how to close their resource gap.
Are you an elected official who’s frustrated that your city doesn’t have enough money to address many of the things you see a need for? Does economic development feel like a consistent losing game?
Or are you a City staff member who feels overburdened, stretched thin, and stuck implementing practices that generate places people struggle to connect with?
Maybe you’re an invested citizen who sees a disconnect between what your neighborhood needs and what is being done to address it—and you’d also like to find the best way to help contribute.
Your city isn’t alone.
Communities across North America face similar challenges. There are lessons to be learned from the few that have found that there’s a better way to build and manage our cities.
Where our workshops will take you:
Understand and be able to communicate the root causes of our cities’ resource gaps, and what that means for the different roles in a city.
Learn how fiscal resilience can be a common language to build consent, frame discussions and inform decisions for complex issues like land use, zoning, infrastructure, and economic development.
Learn a framework to connect people and resources in your community to make immediate and meaningful progress toward shared goals—with resources you actually do have.
Workshop options, at a glance
1-Day Overview
Purpose: Educate & motivate a broad audience.
Overview of why so many cities lack the resources they need, and what a framework for restructuring city processes around fiscal resilience would look like.
2-Day Deep Dive
Purpose: Explore case studies, lessons learned, and how-tos.
Deep dive into the framework (introduced on Day 1) for building long-term fiscal stability through immediate, community led action.
3-Day Local Launch
Purpose: Putting the framework into practice in your community.
Great for strategic planning retreats, kickoff to annual budgeting cycle, or the start of comprehensive planning efforts.
What past attendees have had to say…
Verdunity’s workshop productions are very candid and real discussions on the topics that matter most to cities. They are as educational as any classes I have ever attended in city management, public works or planning. Kevin and his team are taking Strong Towns principles and injecting them with technical components that all cities should employ.
North Texas-area City Manager
Hearing the ways that other cities have implemented things on the ground was the deep dive that I needed to go further in my work in Shreveport.
Chris Lyon, Re:Form Shreveport
This [workshop] helps give tools to me, as an elected official, to go back and share with constituents. Being an elected official is more than just being a representative of people and their opinions; it’s also finding out best practices and educating people, and helping them learn about the best ways to go forward—and this workshop is a really great tool for that aspect of my job.
Ann Zadeh, Elected Official
I really wanted to come up with some ways to do more with less [in my city], to figure out what we have right now and where we need to invest. This was workshop amazing. It was full of great information, and not overwhelming in the way that it was presented. It was bite-sized segments where you could really go back and think about what you could do in your own community.
Ashley Lumpkin, City Planner
Workshop options...
1-Day Overview
A sweeping overview geared toward helping city leaders diagnose, understand, and explain their city’s situation—and get a clear idea of how to close their resource gap.
Learn why so many cities end up with more infrastructure and service needs than they can pay for, why prosperity doesn’t seem to last, and the ways your role specifically forms part of the solution.
Understand how to use the common language of fiscal resilience to frame discussions and inform decisions around land use, economic development, and capital improvement.
Learn how other cities have incentivized citizens to contribute their own time, talent, and treasure to making their neighborhoods more resilient and people-friendly.
2-Day Deep Dive
We drill down into more specifics of how your city—and the individual roles within it—can take immediate steps to make progress on the topics covered in the 1-day workshop.
This longer format gives us room to work through:
Examples of the applications of fiscal analysis to land use, zoning, capital improvement, infrastructure decisions
Strategies for resilient, people- & place-based economic development for cities of all stages
How to build new (or retrofit old) infrastructure in a way that is people-friendly and resource-conscious
Why building a diverse mix of housing and neighborhood types is critical to the long-term vitality of cities - and how to do it
How to assemble (and mobilize) your extended team of community “Cultivators” and prioritize immediate and impactful small bets that add up over time
3-Day Local Launch
If you want to start building an implementation plan that’s specific to your community, our Local Launch workshop brings together as many of your city’s leaders as you’re able to gather. This 3-day workshop is similar to our 2-day workshop, with extra time for us to walk through and understand your city’s resource gap and your available (possibly untapped) resources.
Local Launch workshops are ideal for strategic planning retreats, the kickoff to your annual budgeting cycle, or the initial stages of a comprehensive planning effort.
Who should attend these workshops?
Our workshops are intentionally cross-disciplinary. We find that the makeup differs from place to place, but we have designed these workshops specifically for city leaders, including:
City managers and finance officers
Mayors and other elected and appointed officials
City staff—planning, public works, engineering, housing and neighborhood preservation, etc.
Economic development and school district officials
Implementers—Local philanthropists, business owners, entrepreneurs, citizen activists, realtors, developers and educators (anyone who is passionate about being a change agent in their community
The community-specific workshops (3 days) should, if possible, include all of these roles listed above, plus representatives from other agencies and groups your city partners with.