Citizens working together to analyze the financial health of their cities, towns and counties, across the USA and Canada
Citizens working together to analyze the financial health of their cities, towns and counties, across the USA and Canada
The Hudson Finance Decoder Project (HFDP) is a citizen-driven project to support anyone, anywhere who wants to use the Strong Towns Finance Decoder to analyze and share the story of their city's financial health. Doing so as a group project allows people to share their work and support each other.
The Strong Towns Finance Decoder is a tool created by the organization Strong Towns to help anyone "Visualize the financial trajectory of your city" and "Understand whether your city is on track to keep its development, service, and growth promises."
When you complete a Finance Decoder for your local government you will have measured your city’s financial health using 7 key metrics.
As we have developed our first Finance Decoders for our local governments we have found two things - 1) we understand our community and its financial health a lot better, and 2) we believe that sharing this tool has helped the awareness and accountability of our local government.
You may get other things from participating in the Hudson Finance Decoder Project:
Importantly, you will walk away knowing that you contributed something meaningful to your community.
The Finance Decoder is a Google Sheet with data that you have entered about your city, and graphs that show the 7 financial metrics.
Here are examples for several cities - look at the Results tab to see the 7 metrics for each city:
You can also write a data-driven story around a Finance Decoder.
This is an example for Albany, NY where there is additional trend analysis showing changes between 2023 & 2024.
Here is an example from Ottawa, Ontario where the Finance Decoder underpins a risk analysis document.
Grand Rapid, Michigan has an excellent example that includes some other analysis that builds on the basic Finance Decoder.
To create a Finance Decoder for your local government you will:
All participants will have access to a Slack-based discussion where you can ask questions and help others with their questions as well.
For a full description of the process to create a Finance Decoder, start here.
Creating a Finance Decoder for your local government will take between 4-8 hours.
Importantly, if you hit a brick wall and can’t find information, or if you have any questions that are limiting your progress, just ask! That is the value of the Hudson Finance Decoder Project as a community project - we’re all supporting each other, local government analysis as a team sport!
When we started this project, our goal was to work with volunteers to create Finance Decoders for cities, towns and counties in the Hudson River Valley between Lake Placid, NY and Yonkers, NY.
We then thought “why stop there?!” There is no limit to who we want to support, whether you are in a rural community in Saskatchewan, or in a suburban community in Arizona, we want you as a part of this collaborative project.
But we liked the name and we already purchased hudsonfinancedecoder.com so…
As Strong Towns notes:
“The Finance Decoder isn't just a novel tool; it's grounded in established public accounting standards. Specifically, it draws from the "Indicators of Financial Condition" methodology developed by the Public Sector Accounting Board (PSAB) in Canada and aligned with the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in the U.S. These indicators—focusing on sustainability, flexibility, and vulnerability—are recognized as best practices for assessing long-term financial health.”
The Hudson Finance Decoder Project is supported by:
The Finance Decoder and any other outputs that you create are available via a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to read, share, use and build upon your work for free.
Absolutely not! You will need to learn some accounting-like things along the way, however you don't need to be a bean-counter (or an auditor, or a comptroller, or a finance person or...)
Drop an email to hudsonfinancedecoder@gmail.com and we will answer your question.
Or schedule 15 minutes with us for a Zoom discussion using our Calendly link.
Once you are signed up you will have access to a Slack channel for questions and you can always use our email or Zoom to ask questions.
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