Hot bike, transit, and street safety advocacy summer!
Helping transportation advocates crank up the heat this summer
So far this year, nearly 300 transportation advocates across dozens of states have gotten coaching sessions to help them strengthen their advocacy work. These advocates have gone on to win bike lanes in their community, organize rapid response rallies at their city hall to protest their mayor’s anti-transit stances, launched petitions, started candidate questionnaire projects, gotten unstuck, and much much more. Bit by bit they are making their communities better places to get around on transit, bike, by foot, or with mobility aids – and I’m dedicated to helping passionate people like them become expert advocates so we can all win amazing things.
To help make these advocacy coaching sessions more accessible at this critical time, from now until July 31st, I’m:
Extending hours to better match advocates’ needs
Expanding my offerings of free half-hour consultations to help people who are very early in their advocacy journey.
As someone who shares that hope for a healthier, greener, safer, more accessible world, I wanted to let you know. If you’re up for it, please share the update with your networks, online communities, and individuals who you think might be interested in strengthening their advocacy efforts.
Coaching sessions are geared towards helping advocates work through the problems they want to tackle. In them:
Bus advocates have shared how they felt alone their community in wanting better bus services and we worked up strategies for finding allies among fellow bus riders and how to ID & approach adjacent groups about forming a pro-bus coalition
Bike advocates have expressed their frustration with the complete disregard their mayor treats them and the difficulty they have experienced winning over allies from the general community. In our sessions we’ve worked through how to change up their approach and come at the issue from a different angle to shift the conversation to be more productive
Street safety advocates have said that their pleas for action from city officials keep getting ignored as the death toll on their roads mount. In our sessions we talked through how to put together powerful political actions, build community, and ratchet up pressure on politicians to hold them accountable.
Urbanism advocates have said they want to win so many changes they’ve read about online but had no idea how to get started – so we worked to help them articulate their core vision, build a campaign plan towards that, and laid out a framework they can later expand from to make progress on their other goals
If you know folks who want their community to be better for transit, biking, and getting around outside of a car and want help strengthening their advocacy, please forward this email to them. I’d love to help them out! They can schedule a session here.
In the meantime, I am still helping organizations of all sizes with workshops and other consulting services, working with donors to help foster advocacy in regions they want to support, working on my book for Island Press that is a training guide for transportation advocates, and putting out weekly advocacy explainers here. There are so many changes we need to win at the local, state and federal levels and I’m looking forward to continuing to help advocates win a lot more!
Sincerely,
Carter Lavin