New: Integrating Equity in Bike Advocacy

While “equity” is a more and more common term to hear in bike circles, many people have asked us what it should mean in their work. The simple answer is that a commitment to equitable outcomes takes shape differently depending on the task. 

For planners, it might mean strengthening a community outreach process, such as what the City of Cambridge has done in creating a Community Engagement Team. For a bike shop, it might mean going out of your way to create a welcoming space for new customers, like the Ladies Night Out put on by NOW Bikes and Fitness in St. Paul. For individual cyclists, it could mean helping reach out to invisible riders, such as the City of Lights program that Planet Bike funded at the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition in 2008. 

Here at the League, we’ve been working on defining what bike equity means for an organization like ours. Today we are releasing a report, Integrating Equity in Bike Advocacy, that shares the process we’ve been developing. This report includes a timeline tracing the evolution of our Equity Initiative, our framework for integrating equity into each League program, and some lessons we have learned. Each of our staff work plans now has at least one equity, diversity, or inclusion related task to be completed in 2014. 

Our work has taken shape through consultation with Queta González at the Center for Diversity and the Environment in Portland, and with fellow bike advocates at Bike Easy, Bike East Bay, Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, the BTA, and the Community Cycling Center. Thanks for thinking with us! Thanks also go to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is funding our Equity Initiative.

We will host a webinar on the report in the upcoming weeks; stay tuned for details.