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Talking Headways Podcast: St. Louis Is Awesome! You Just Don’t Realize It

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Meal delivery is one service of Project Roomkey. Photo: LAHSA

This week we’re joined by Tara Pham, a San Francisco native who took her talents to St. Louis for college and stuck around. She talks about her company CTY, which creates tools for tracking local data, and how living in St. Louis and the perception of neighborhoods led her and her friends to the idea of counting people, not cars.

"We don’t measure people on foot or on bicycle," she says. "The assumption is that if we don’t have data for it, they must not be there. And that’s just not true."

Tara says Mayor Francis Slay is appointing more young people in his cabinet who are thinking about civic innovation and how small fixes can address big problems. Hear what she has to say about how innovation doesn’t always have to do with technology, and find out what the deal is with Sloup, the monthly community meal where new ideas get crowdfunded.

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