That’s right Red Leader. Almost there! Stay on Target!

You’ll be o.k.

And, while I may not have had the Deathstar to blow up, I did have a research paper due yesterday. It was a ton of work, but I had a great time. Really. I'd like to compare it to having a bunch of puzzle pieces and dumping them out onto a table, and then having to put them together again. I actually quite surprised that no one resource had really compiled the rich history of nonprofits in our cycling community. I think it would make for a great lecturing piece. Any ways, I wanted to leave you with an summary of what I learned from the paper. So, here it is.

"Nonprofits have shared over a century of history with the cycling community. Organizations repeatedly met the needs of the cyclist when collaboration and advocacy was necessary to address inherent challenges of our car-centric society. Yet it wasn’t until the environmentalist movement and the advent of the mountain bike that two dynamic subcultures converged, adding momentum to an already burgeoning cycling lifestyle. With the transportation funding beginning to trickle to the cycling infrastructure, clubs and organizations recognized the power of advocacy. Signaled by the ISTEA of 1991 the role of advocacy and lobbying amongst bike nonprofits was to irrevocably change. Cycling’s new face of advocacy was cemented with the America Bikes coalition. This collective represented some of the most influential nonprofits from the world of cycling. With newfound collaboration, advocates realized an opportunity to add clear, undisputable quantification to benefits supported by previously unsubstantiated, anecdotal evidence. The Benchmark Project was introduced in 2003, and continues to define and affirm the advantages of active transportation. Backed by a government that understands these advantages and demonstrates that comprehension by funding cycling infrastructure, bike nonprofits are poised to take the next evolutionary step. Loek Heseman’s report reveals the importance of tapping into cycling’s social relevance. What capacity nonprofits have in the future of the cycling community relies on the activation of the bike culture."

If you could cram ~10 pages of cycling nonprofit goodness down to a paragraph, that was it. Whew.

So, is this the last post you'll see from me? Nah. Count on me chiming in from time to time, in hopes to elucidate the role of bike in nonprofits, nonprofits in bikes, and Magnum P.I. in shorts.

-michael

ps. And, yes Celeste, now we do the dance of joy.