A cause for the whole city
Chicago's flag has four red stars, one for each moment big enough to earn a place on it. This is about the fifth.
The idea
The four stars on the Chicago flag each mark something that happened: Fort Dearborn, the Great Fire, the World's Columbian Exposition, the Century of Progress. Every one was an event, a moment in the past. But what if the fifth star wasn't a moment at all? What if it was a direction?
A cause the whole city could get behind and say: if we did this, it would warrant adding a star to the flag. The initiative might take so long that Chicago earns back the rights to its own parking meters before we get there. That's fine. It's a heading, not a deadline. Something we can all rally behind.
I spend a lot of time preaching about One Target Customer, the single person a business builds everything around. It turns out a city could use the same kind of clarity. Family of mine who fight for equality have a version of it they keep coming back to: make the world safe for a sixteen-year-old Black trans kid, and everybody is better off. Something with that kind of gravity. One north star for a whole community.
The false start
Naturally, I tried to launch it by selling merch. I put the fifth star on hats and hoodies and tees, spun up a little store, and then never promoted it. Never put a dollar into marketing it. It just sat there. So consider this its first real billboard.
Your turn
This is bigger than one person, and I'm always looking to build things with friends. If you have an idea for where the fifth star could go, a cause worth rallying a city around, drop me a line.