What Good Looks Like: A Build Cities Workshop with Daron Babcock
What if building a better city started with a simple question: what do you want to build?
Join Nick Smoot and Daron Babcock for a two-session Build Cities workshop on what good looks like in a city: proximity, trust, work, accountability, and the courage to build.
Daron is Managing Director of Community Transformation at Stand Together Foundation. His work in Bonton showed that community change does not begin with a top-down program. It begins with listening, friendship, local enterprise, health, transportation, education, housing, and the stubborn belief that people flourish when the right conditions exist around them.
In Bonton, that approach helped create measurable neighborhood change over time: stronger household income, rising home values, higher graduation rates, lower teen pregnancy, and major reductions in crime. The lesson is not that one program fixes a place. The lesson is that when people are known, supported, challenged, and surrounded by the right conditions, communities can begin to heal and build from the inside out.
Build Cities exists to reconnect human purpose to economic opportunity by helping residents, builders, cities, and institutions find each other and turn potential into civic progress. This workshop is a working session for that same idea in Coeur d'Alene: not another panel about problems, but a room of people naming what they want to build and finding the friends, resources, and next steps to begin.
You do not need to arrive with a polished idea. Bring a challenge you care about, a project you have been carrying, a neighborhood opportunity you see, or simply a willingness to help build something useful.
The goal is not just better metrics. The goal is a better life together: the kind of flourishing that is hard to reduce to a spreadsheet, but unmistakable when you see it.
Schedule
Session 1: Discover and Define11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Participants will name the opportunities, challenges, and ideas they want to work on. The goal is to move from broad concern to clear project direction.
Break / optional smaller conversations12:00-4:30 PM
Session 2: Shape and Activate4:30-6:00 PM
Participants will refine project concepts, identify collaborators and resources, and define the next concrete action needed to move forward.
Community dinner after the second session
Across the two sessions, participants will:
Explore purpose, contribution, and belonging in community building.
Look upstream from visible problems toward root causes and conditions.
Identify local opportunities that can become buildable projects.
Think through the conditions for flourishing: relationships, economics, health, transportation, education, housing, and practical support.
Map the people, skills, partners, resources, and next steps needed to move ideas forward.
Meet other builders who may become collaborators, mentors, supporters, or friends in the work.
This is not a lecture. It is a working session for people who want to leave with more clarity, more momentum, and a stronger sense of who they can build with.
Tickets
General registration is $35.
Build members may register free using the Build Member ticket. Build Member registrations require approval by Nick.