Mississippi Good: Moving People Toward Human Flourishing

In 2024, the League’s Bicycle Friendly America program awarded Community Spark Grants of $1,500 each to 15 organizations for projects that spark change and catalyze a community’s ability to create places where bicycling is a safe, easy, and more accessible option. This program is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as part of the CDC’s Active People, Healthy Nation℠ Initiative, which aims to help 27 million Americans become more physically active by 2027. Separately, the program is also supported by General Motors.

Go Gulfport’s Spark Grant project, “Mobility Justice 101 Seminar,” provided training to several community members to become leaders in a connected network of champions around cycling infrastructure and active transportation. This project was designed to ignite an emerging coalition along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, that started in Gulfport, Mississippi. We share this story, written by Gulfport native and Sacred Roots founder Ronnie Matthew Harris, to inspire projects where all it takes is one small spark to ignite regional change. 

Growing up in Gulfport, my childhood friends and I were essentially governed by a single outdoor rule: “Be home before dark.” Free to move about the city, we’d ride our bikes from sun up to sun down, canvassing a wide range of diverse neighborhoods. In fact, one could always tell where a group of kids were by the countless number of bikes parked in a given yard, playground, or corner store. There are all kinds of reasons today for why those days are long gone, and for some kids there is none as compelling as what Professor Charles T. Brown calls ‘arrested mobility’—the disproportionate number of threats from enforcement and other sources that Black Americans experience while ‘walking, running, and riding bicycles …’

In 2023, we partnered with Heritage Trails Partnership of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the National Recreation Foundation to provide outdoor recreation opportunities for neighborhood youth in our newly improved Clower-Thornton Nature Area, emphasizing the benefits of cycling at each event. We were also selected by City Thread to be among nine other cities to participate in their Accelerated Mobility Program, resulting in ‘a strategic roadmap to improve mobility network implementation, build lasting partnerships with community decision makers, and amplify existing public support for changes to the city’s streets.’ 

With a roadmap in hand, we needed partners — people who believed in our efforts to establish a coalition of community members committed to building on the recent construction of a new bike/ped/tram bridge in the city’s downtown. Our primary goal is to continue to engage folks around the opportunities, joys, returns on investment, health, and economic benefits of having a cycling community. To put it plainly, we’re looking to see what is found downtown being spread around town. 

As a part of these ongoing efforts, we applied and were awarded a Spark grant to host a Mobility Justice 101 seminar for community leaders. This project strengthened relationships and provided excellent community-based education to our in-neighborhood champions. As a part of the seminar, two presentations were provided by Dan Farve and Charles T. Brown which shared knowledge, best practices, and tangible next steps with our budding coalition. When confronted with the deep and complex details associated with mobility justice, a participant is quoted as having said, “You didn’t tell me it was going to be such a heavy morning. But I’m here for it. Great presentations.” (Sonya Williams-Barnes, State Policy Director, Southern Poverty Law Center)

We estimate about 100 people were reached directly and indirectly by the seminar.  Fourteen community champions came as participants to the seminar, and we estimate they each shared some of their learnings with at least five people. An additional 30+ people were engaged by the facilitator via social media exchanges, phone conversations, in-person discussions, coalition invitations and otherwise. 

Moving forward, we’ll continue to create community rides, forums, and other platforms to both discuss and enact change around improving local infrastructure. To that end, we’re most excited about an opportunity to create a dedicated bike or shared-use path, dubbed the Major Taylor Cultural Trail. This low-stress, tree-laden path will connect multiple Historic neighborhoods to both one another and the larger community’s cycling infrastructure including an America’s Great Outdoors Project, the Mississippi Coastal Heritage Trail. 

Thanks to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Active People, Healthy Nation initiative and partners like the League of American Bicyclists, Bike Walk Mississippi, Equitable Transportation Fund, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Thriving Communities Technical Assistance from Charles T. Brown at Equitable Cities, and the ongoing support from our regional partners (including Gulf Coast Community Design Studio, Coast Transit Authority, and Dan Favre at Greater New Orleans Foundation), our chances of seeing kids biking their neighborhoods again isn’t just good; it’s Mississippi Good. Stay tuned.