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Bicycling organizations in Northwest Arkansas are joining together for this inaugural event, taking place virtually and in-person from July 23-24.

The metropolitan region known as Northwest Arkansas, tucked in the Ozark Mountains, is big on bicycling. With four-season riding, varied terrain and plenty of natural beauty, it’s a mountain biker’s paradise and, increasingly, a place people from all backgrounds feel comfortable jumping on two wheels. In order to sustain growth, two nonprofits — BikeNWA, a bike advocacy and education group, and NWA Trailblazers, an organization that develops multi-use trails — made it their joint mission to build up local infrastructure and ridership.

Earlier this year, the Walton Family Foundation, which is based in Bentonville, Arkansas, approached the organizations and proposed they launch a women’s summit. For Bianca Montoya, who serves as the communications and marketing director for both organizations, saying yes was a no-brainer. The BikeNWA team immediately thought to bring in another Northwest Arkansas group: Bike.POC, an organization formed by Kim Seay and Bea Apple in early 2020 to be vocal and upfront about social justice in a way the local bicycling community hadn’t traditionally been. In a fit of collaboration, Critical Mass: A Summit Empowering All Women was born. 

“With the summit, our goal is to help women interested in social change by offering empowering and interactive sessions that provide everyone attending with knowledge and tangible skills,” said Apple. “But also, we want to help them understand how trails, cycling and active transportation is relevant to their work and personal lives.”

For many, the last year has been eye-opening when it comes to recognizing all of the voices missing from our industry’s proverbial table. Arkansas in particular gained notoriety for its efforts to restrict the rights of marginalized groups. The Critical Mass summit, July 23-24, is a way to harness the collective desire for social justice to create real change in the bicycling industry. Part and parcel of that plan is the need to create a space where women and non-binary folks, especially people of color, feel welcome and comfortable. 

“Especially in cycling, if the most marginalized among us — which is usually a Black or brown woman — feels comfortable in a space, then everyone does,” said Apple. “But it doesn’t work the other way around and we’ve seen that for too long. We’re trying to flip that approach to make sure that everybody is included.”

The team behind the summit is all-female and, recognizing the transformative power of bicycling, wants to bring that to communities that need it the most. In line with that goal, summit organizers have been intentional with their outreach, engaging with historically underserved groups, nonprofits and community organizations in the Northwest Arkansas area, as well as offering PTO, childcare reimbursements and scholarships (in an effort to facilitate attendance and encourage community, PeopleForBikes’ Northwest Arkansas team also sponsored three scholarships for local J.B. Hunt employees). 

“It’s a lot of dialog and conversation with the people you’re trying to reach, asking, ‘What would make you feel comfortable? What are the barriers keeping you from attending?’ — and then working to address them,” said Montoya, emphasizing that you can’t just throw something at the wall and hope it sticks.

Likewise, the summit schedule is curated to both offer resources — powerful speakers, toolkits and workshops — as well as experiential components that incorporate movement and meditative practices, so that attendees leave with a toolkit that, according to Apple, “allows them to feel good as they do good.” One of the keynote speakers is Dr. Destiny Thomas, a California-based anthropologist planner who helped envision the Better Bike Share Partnership’s Transportation Justice fellowship program and now oversees its cohort of 12. In a session titled, “Why We Should Engage in the Development of Our Growing Cities,” Dr. Thomas will speak to the need for everyone to participate in advocacy around our built environment, as well as why that advocacy needs to center marginalized people.

Also on the agenda is Charlene Mac, a strategist and management consultant, as well as a teaching fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, who will provide summit attendees with a crash course in community organizing. Many sessions include facilitated breakout discussions, offering a chance for intimacy, networking and authentic conversation. Other presentations include “How to Sustain your Own Momentum: Cultivating Resilience to Avoid Burning Out” with somatic coach Kelsey Blackwell and “Celebrating your Accomplishments with Ritual and Remedy” with traditional healer Felicia Ruiz. 

Outdoor industry stalwarts in the DEI space, Aparna Rajagopal of the Arvana Group and Elyse Rylander, manager of diversity, equity and inclusion at Quality Bicycle Products, will lead concurrent sessions for white and BIPOC women to explore “Building Inclusive Spaces and Navigating Barriers.” Rounding up the lineup of speakers is an elected official policy panel complete with Arkansas representatives from the local, county and state levels.

“We want women to be empowered, understand what their resources are and understand how they can take action to create change,” said Apple.

All speaker sessions will take place on Friday, July 23, and are completely virtual, while the second day of the summit, Saturday, July 24, is reserved for in-person, outdoor experiences. Recognizing the intersectionality among identities and different social change groups, all women and non-binary individuals are welcome to attend, no matter what industry they work in or where they call home. Wholistically, Critical Mass is about coming together as a group, building relationships and making change.

“We really see the summit as a two-way conversation and an opportunity for bike organizations to hear from people in these marginalized communities,” said Apple, noting that it’s important to flip the script and do things with communities rather than to them. “It’s a great opportunity for bike advocacy organizations who have said they want to lean into the DEI space to have a seat at the table, but be there to listen.”

Critical Mass: A Summit Empowering All Women

On July 28, tune in for evidence-based ways to advance youth and community well-being through bicycling. While the event is totally free, registration is required.

After students in her class began riding bikes more frequently, Lacey Munden saw a noticeable improvement in their confidence and mental health. Munden, a classroom teacher at RL Clemitson School, was impressed, attributing the change to Riding For Focus, Outride’s middle school bicycle education program. “The increase in confidence I have seen on and off the bike has been shocking,” said Munden. 

To date, Riding For Focus has been established in 200 schools throughout 44 U.S. states and Canada. The program provides schools with everything they need to get their 6th-8th grade students riding, including bikes, helmets, curriculum and intensive teacher training. Students participating in the program consistently self-report stronger peer relationships and better focus at school. 

Outride’s 2021 Research Summit, "Advancing Youth and Community Well-Being through Cycling,” will showcase similar findings from the Riding For Focus program, as well as more general bicycling research from organizations around the world. The conference will take place on July 28, 2021, and although it’s completely free and open to the public, registration is required. From 11:30 am - 7:30 pm EST, Outride’s own research team and others will highlight the impact of bicycling on health, equity, happiness and community well-being, with a specific focus on youth. 

“The summit will be a space where people doing the work to strengthen their communities through cycling can learn from each other and put that research into practice,” said Esther Walker, Outride’s research program manager. “Our bigger goal is to create a space for sharing and empower people to make an impact locally,” 

Each summit presentation will feature actionable research insights so that attendees will come away with applicable, relevant lessons for their communities. Attendees can expect virtual presentations covering a wide range of topics from the impact of bicycling on cognitive function and mental health, to presentations on women’s empowerment through bikes and gendered barriers to bicycling. The research summit's full agenda can be previewed here. 

PeopleForBikes’ team member Rebecca Davies, a product manager and data analyst, will highlight the PeopleForBikes’ Bicycle Network Analysis tool and its potential to measure how accessible school locations are by bike. We’ll also hear directly from youth about how bicycling impacts their lives and communities, including representatives of the National Youth Bike Council, a group of teenagers organizing young leaders in bicycling communities around the country. 

As a leading national youth bicycling organization, Outride is working to get more kids on bikes and build more diverse, equitable and healthy cycling communities in partnership with schools, communities and researchers around the country. We’re proud to partner with Outride and hope you’ll join us at the 2021 Research Summit.

Click here to learn more about the 2021 Outride Research Summit and register to attend.

In Arizona’s Verde Valley, PeopleForBikes and other partners are coming together to create a community hub for mountain biking.

Roughly 100 miles north of Phoenix, in the geographic center of Arizona, the Verde River flows from north to south, carving through a stretch of land defined by red rocks, scenic mountain vistas and dense Ponderosa Pine forests. Known as the Verde Valley, this 714-square-mile area encompasses the towns of Cottonwood, Clarkdale, Camp Verde, Jerome and, most well known, Sedona. It’s here that a 2021 PeopleForBikes grant recipient, Verde Valley Wheel Fun, is building a mountain bike skills park. 

Although Sedona is generally known as a wealthy retiree community with a New Age vibe, the rest of the Verde Valley isn’t all art galleries and five-star spas. As is often the case with centers of wealth, many local residents work in the service industry or trades, raising kids on low-wage jobs. In fact, roughly half of the children attending school in the Verde Valley are enrolled in the National School Lunch Program, a federally assisted meal plan that provides low-cost or free lunches to students. Where the bike skills park is being built, at the Oak Creek Elementary School in the unincorporated town of Cornville, the landscape is more rural and tourists are a rarer sight.

Sedona and the surrounding area is famous for mountain and road biking, a year-round destination for people drawn to two-wheel fun on red dirt and long stretches of pavement flanked by incredible views. Most of the area’s trails are the result of Forest Service and community efforts including the Verde Valley Cyclists Coalition, an organization comprised of both road and mountain bikers that’s worked to improve the region’s bicycling environment since 1992. In 2017, the nonprofit began to focus on giving back to the local community beyond trail building and maintenance, launching a series of after-school mountain bike clubs. By 2019, it became its own entity, Verde Valley Wheel Fun (FUN).

“We just started growing faster than we could imagine,” said Kevin Adams, co-founder and treasurer at FUN. “This fall, we’ll start our thirteenth after-school club at 13 different schools here. We keep adding schools based on how fast we can raise money and get bikes.”

With the current programming in place, there will be some 130 kids participating in after-school mountain bike clubs throughout the Verde Valley, coached by 33 trained volunteers. As Adams sees it, one of the benefits of the clubs is that they get young people off their electronic devices and active outside. Since participating in the after-school clubs is a privilege, not a right, youth are also motivated to keep their grades up. Reports from the schools indicate that kids in the yearlong program either maintain or improve their reading levels and math scores. The bike clubs aren’t just for boys, either, with about 40% of participants identifying as female (as well as half of the coaches).

Alongside the $7,500 in funding received from PeopleForBikes, the Trek Foundation committed $60,000 to fund the Oak Creek School Mountain Bike Skills Park. Additional donations from the Catena Foundation, the Mountain Bike Association of Arizona, Arizona Community Foundation of Yavapai County, Arizona Community Foundation of Sedona and private individuals led to a total of more than $140,000 in funding. The bike park will break ground on January 3, 2022 — the best time to build in the desert — and will take six weeks to complete. A youth-led project to build a fitness course will be located adjacent to the park and is set to be completed this September.

Last year, FUN secured a $15,000 grant from the Outride Fund — the matching community grant program offered by the youth bicycling organization Outride — to build a mountain bike skills park at Mountain View Preparatory, a public K-8 school in Cottonwood. That bike park, which opened in April 2021, serves as a proof of concept for the new project and is part of what’s making the region a true bicycling ecosystem. Outride, a PeopleForBikes partner, believes investing in bicycling communities not only creates a more equitable, accessible and diverse bike industry but also leads to improved health outcomes among youth. 

“So often, bike trails are inaccessible to kids whose parents aren’t cyclists,” said Andy Cunningham, who manages the Outride Fund. “One of the things that’s great about Verde Valley Wheel Fun is that they’re building bike parks adjacent to schools, where kids are actually living. That way, kids don’t need a parent to ride and can go there with their friends.”

Complementing FUN’s after-school programs is Outride’s Riding for Focus program, a middle school bike curriculum designed to be implemented as part of a typical physical education class. Once FUN completed its first skills park, it reached out to the principal of another nearby middle school in the district, the Cottonwood Community School, to see if they’d be interested in applying for a Riding for Focus grant. Cottonwood Community is located downtown in a part of the city that has 85% participation in the National School Lunch Program and a student population that’s about 58% Hispanic. For the school, applying for the program was a no-brainer.

“The outcome of that is going to be a fleet of bikes in the middle school plus a trained P.E. teacher, so those kids are going to learn how to ride safely,” said Cunningham. “Once they have that basic level of confidence, they can actually walk over and ride on the new bike park that’s down the road. It's pretty awesome.”

Outride’s own research has shown that beyond the many physical benefits of riding, biking is a great way for kids to build social connections and community. Youths who regularly engage in physical activity report less depression and anxiety symptoms, have higher self-esteem and also perform better academically than kids who are inactive. Through the Riding for Focus program, kids become excited about P.E. and many gain access to a bike for the first time.

Long term, Outride wants access to bikes and bike programs to be as ubiquitous as our public libraries, ever-present even in America’s smallest towns. That means helping to grow bicycling communities through Riding for Focus and new bike parks, as well as educational initiatives, earn-a-bike programs and even bicycle cooperatives. In the nearby Four Corners region, which encompasses parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and the Diné (Navajo) nation, Outride is working with community partners like Silver Stallion Bicycle & Coffee, a mobile bike shop, and Project Bike Tech to build a bicycling ecosystem. There, like in the Verde Valley and other rural communities, bikes play a crucial role when it comes to connecting people and improving both mental and physical health outcomes for children. 

“In a lot of these small, rural, isolated towns, there’s often not a lot kids can do — especially in the last year, when indoor spaces were shut down,” said Cunningham. “For these kids that can safely ride in a bike park? There must be such a sense of joy and freedom. That’s a pretty cool gift we can bring that hopefully doesn't benefit just children, but families and the whole community too.”

In King County, Washington, a coalition of advocates is fighting to repeal a helmet mandate that disproportionately harms BIPOC and homeless cyclists.

For members of Central Seattle Greenways, a safe streets advocacy group, the murder of George Floyd was a motivating event. As national cries for racial justice grew louder in the wake of Floyd’s death, many people across industries wondered how they might show up as allies to create lasting change. The transportation community was no different.

“What our group hit on was that we wanted to address barriers to bicycling for communities of color and other more marginalized groups in Seattle,” says Ethan Campbell, a member of Central Seattle Greenways. “But we really didn’t have the data to understand what issues there were.”

On paper, many bicycle laws — such as those that require people to wear helmets, use bike lights, obtain a bike license or register their bikes — seem like a great idea. After all, helmets can protect our heads in the case of a crash, lights help bikers see and be seen, bike licenses can raise money for infrastructure and bike registrations safeguard people against theft. At least that’s all true in theory. In reality, these laws are virtually unknown and rarely enforced. When they do get enforced, it’s usually to the detriment of BIPOC citizens or those experiencing homelessness.

Evidence from across the nation demonstrates this alarming trend — studies from five major U.S. cities, including Washington, DC, all indicate helmet laws are being used to stop and question cyclists in neighborhoods of color at disproportionate rates. Bike registration laws can be similarly problematic. This April, a video surfaced of Black and Latinx teens in New Jersey being handcuffed by police for not having their bikes registered. Although originally intended to promote safety and make biking better, these laws now mirror the outcomes of similar traffic laws for walking and driving that have led to persistent racial bias in their enforcement. 

Central Seattle Greenways decided to look at bicycle laws and see if they were enforced differently in King County depending on demographics. Of particular concern was the ordinance requiring all bicyclists to wear a helmet when riding on a public roadway, bike path or other publicly-owned areas, which was first enacted in King County in 1993 (Seattle didn’t adopt the law until 2003). After filing public records requests and sifting through the citation data, the group immediately discovered large disparities by race in terms of who gets cited for not wearing a helmet. With that discovery, the Helmet Law Working Group was formed. 

In Seattle, nearly half of all helmet citations since 2017 were issued to the unhoused population and in 2019 alone, the statistic was at least 60%. Since 2003, Black bicyclists in Seattle have received citations at a rate 3.8 times higher than white bicyclists; citation rates were 2.2 times higher and 1.4 times higher for Indigenous and Latino bicyclists, respectively. Importantly, differences in helmet use between populations cannot explain these disparities, only bias in enforcement can. Much like stop-and-frisk policies in New York City, the helmet law has also been used in Seattle to effect pretextual stops.

In any city, a minor traffic stop while bicycling can be traumatic and incidents have resulted in the use of force against bicyclists or even fatal shootings. For youth, interactions with the police are equally rattling. Campbell, who now co-leads the Helmet Law Working Group, notes stories from youth where they were detained for an hour by police for not wearing a helmet. Like their adult counterparts, youth of color are targeted far more often and treated much worse. 

“That sort of [youth] harassment is just chilling and it doesn’t help get people on bikes,” says Campbell, adding that the psychological trauma has been known to have a lasting effect. “It’s important to acknowledge the harm that policing has caused and how the public health community has neglected the issue.”

King County, Washington, where Seattle is located, was renamed in honor of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1986. That the helmet law in King County disproportionately affects people that look like Reverend King — Black and brown men — is ironic but not unsurprising. Twenty-two states including D.C. currently have helmet laws for bicyclists below a certain age, generally about 16. King County’s helmet law is unusual in that it was mandated by the Board of Health (typically, the laws originate in local government) and that it’s all ages, meaning children can face fines (there are only 47 all-ages helmet ordinances in just 8 states).

Shortly after the Central Seattle Greenways volunteers launched the Helmet Law Working Group, they were joined by the Cascade Bicycle Club, the nation’s largest statewide bicycling nonprofit, and Real Change, a nonprofit newsletter that provides opportunity and a voice to those experiencing poverty and homelessness. Real Change was moved to join after one of their vendors, a homeless man, was hit by a car while biking. As he was on the ground in agony, he was cited for not wearing a helmet, while the driver who was at fault was let go. 

“Cascade Bicycle Club joining was more of a surprise,” says Campbell. “They were supporters of the law decades ago, so it was a shift for them to come around to the idea that the law is doing more harm than it is good.”

Today, the working group has 18 members, mostly advocates, and some 23 organizations, including PeopleForBikes, have endorsed the group’s recommendation to repeal the helmet law, or at the least, make some sweeping changes to it. For the past year, the group has met monthly and although its membership isn’t exclusively white, its own demographics have merited a fair amount of introspection. 

“We all see a duty to use our privilege in service of something that isn’t directly affecting most of us,” says Campbell, who’s Asian American.

In the months following its inception, the Helmet Law Working Group compiled an extensive Q&A companion document outlining the rationale behind its recommendations regarding the law. The group walks the line between acknowledging that the law was well-intentioned and highlighting the inequity of its lived reality. In the ‘90s, when helmet laws first became a thing, helmet use rates were on the up and injuries were down. In the decades since, however, norms, culture and the built environment have changed. Today, the most rigorous, relevant and recent studies have found that helmet mandates don’t make an appreciable difference in preventing head injury. That’s not to say helmets don’t make a difference in preventing injury — they do — but rather that helmet laws do nothing to get people to adopt helmet use.

“In King County, the difference is really indistinguishable,” says Campbell, referring to the group’s research. “The chance of getting cited for not wearing a helmet is far less than 1% if you just go on a ride, so the law isn’t a really big deterrent at this point either. When it is being enforced though, it’s being done so in a really discretionary, disparate manner.”

In February 2021, the working group successfully lobbied the King County Board of Health to review the helmet law, a process that has already begun and is expected to last for several months. The group’s Letter to the Board of Health opposes all options that “fall short of preventing dangerous police interactions and ending punitive, armed enforcement.” Additionally, the letter recommends adopting laws that protect bicyclists in the event of a crash, distributing more free helmets within low-income populations and launching an education campaign about the importance of helmet use from an early age. 

In general, Campbell and others in the group are pushing the Board of Health to adopt a more holistic view. That means focusing on alternative ways of promoting helmet use, as well as pinpointing the biggest health hazard around: cars. Lower speed limits, safer intersections and better infrastructure, including more protected bike lanes, have been proven to save lives and getting the Board of Health to endorse them as part of a public safety solution would be a huge win. 

“We've heard concerns that repealing [the helmet law] would send a message that helmets aren’t important and that's absolutely not the message we want to send,” says Campbell. “Helmets are significant but the messaging needs to be nuanced — they’re not a force shield that protects you from injury and you’re still at risk in a big way.”

Whenever a conversation veers into edgy territory — whether in regards to public safety, sharing the road or racism — things have a tendency to get heated. However, if we’re truly committed to a more equitable mobility space, where all bodies can move freely without the fear of unjust enforcement, then it’s important to engage with these topics in a level-headed way. By taking a research-based approach, the Helmet Law Working Group has uncovered a public health crisis that’s hard to argue with and realistically, should have been obvious decades ago.

Back then though, we weren’t paying enough attention to the experiences of all bicyclists. If we’re claiming to pay attention now, then it’s time to change.

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