One Street News

July 2010

Vol. 3, Issue 6

  1. VISTA for Social Bike Business
  2. Meet Our New Advisors
  3. Resources Highlights – Priority Matrix
  4. Hot Topics – Dangerous Doldrums 

VISTA for Social Bike Business 

Michael Dummeyer has joined the One Street team as our new AmeriCorps VISTA member. AmeriCorps VISTA is a fantastic program through our federal government that matches talented people with nonprofits or local government agencies to serve full-time for a full year on programs that fight poverty. One Street’s Social Bike Business program was the perfect match because it lifts people out of poverty by providing affordable transportation bicycles as well as bicycle job training and careers. We are very grateful to have been chosen as one of the lucky beneficiaries of this program.   

Over the next year, Michael will serve as One Street’s Social Bike Business Coordinator, reaching out to and assisting our current and potential local partners who want their own Social Bike Business program. Through this direct work with our local partners, Michael will learn what they need most to thrive with the program. He will then develop these tools and compile them into our Social Bike Business Manual so that future partners can achieve success even quicker. As part of the manual, Michael will also fully develop our job training curriculum following our six certification modules:

  1. Basic Bicycle Use & Repair
  2. Social Bike Shop Intro
  3. Merchandising and Marketing
  4. Business Management
  5. Sales and Customer Service
  6. Advanced Bicycle Repair

He has already been working with our local partners, soaking up the program concepts and researching potential funders to ensure One Street can reach our goals for all the local programs we serve. If you would like to meet Michael, drop by our office during business hours at 309 E. Gurley St. in Prescott, Arizona. You can also reach him by phone: 928-541-9357 or email: michael.dummeyer{at}onestreet.org  

Meet Our New Advisors

By: Sue Knaup

Please join us in welcoming our most recent additions to One Street’s Board of Advisors! 

 

KAREN OVERTON - founded and served as executive director of one of the U.S.’s most successful community bike programs: Recycle-A-Bicycle in New York City. Before that she worked with ITDP on a bike program in Mozambique, adding up to nearly twenty years of experience pertinent to our Social Bike Business program. Over these years, Karen has sought a way to connect effective social bike programs so that they can help each other serve even more disadvantaged people with bicycles. Recently, she reached out to me to offer her ideas and assistance through our Social Bike Business program because she recognizes its potential to offer this important networking service, including One Street’s expertise in serving the needs of organization leaders. Karen is now working with the New York City Parks Department, bringing greenways and bicycle concepts to their programs as she continues to serve R-A-B and other bicycle programs throughout the city. I am so looking forward to working with Karen to build our Social Bike Business program. My only challenge will be to avoid pestering her too much...

 

MIKAEL COLVILLE-ANDERSEN - has been shaking up the bicycle advocacy world ever since he launched his award-winning blog Copenhagenize.com followed by Copenhagencyclechic.com. Mikael’s expertise, which you will see in his blogs, is to capture the fashionable, everyday side of cycling in photos and film. The film he did for the City of Copenhagen (his home town) is featured on One Street’s home page this month.  I have worked with Mikael over the past three years through his other passion—the exposure of the harm that bicycle helmet promotions do to our movement. He has offered many connections and lots of material to the European Cyclists’ Federation’s campaign to stop the dangerisation of cycling through helmet promotions. Mikael has also been one of One Street’s best promoters, often highlighting our work in his blogs. I’m looking forward to tapping his expertise, passion and his edgy way of presenting bicycle advocacy issues for One Street’s efforts. 

Resources Highlights – Priority Matrix 

Have you ever looked back on a week spent at your organization and wondered what the heck you, your staff and volunteers accomplished? Then you need to take a look at this Priority Matrix which we just added to our Management page in the left menu of the One Street website. This is the best tool we have come across to show how to keep your organization working efficiently towards its mission. It is split into four quadrants, only one of which you should be spending significant time in. That quadrant is called “Important, Not Urgent. If your first reaction is, “But everything we do at our organization is urgent!” then you REALLY need to study this matrix. Then shift your concept of your organization’s efforts into well-planned, prioritized tasks that everyone understands, is prepared for and can comfortably accomplish without stress. We send our thanks to PowerSource Int’l, a consulting firm based in Prescott, Arizona for this enlightening yet so simple resource.

Hot Topics – Dangerous Doldrums 

Through One Street’s On-Call Support system we receive frequent calls and emails from leaders of organizations needing our confidential help. We find many of these requests are for common problems and syndromes that are easy to solve because of our past experience with them, even giving some of the syndromes names. But one of the most common will never get easier to respond to no matter how many times we face it. This is because leaders who are caught in its grip are generally quite happy to be there.

The “Dangerous Doldrums” take hold when leaders of an established organization discover that the sky doesn’t fall if they choose not to do anything. They meet and discuss bicycle campaigns and programs, decide these would be a lot of work, and choose instead not to do the work. They close the meeting proud of their wisdom and schedule the next meeting where they discuss bicycle campaigns and programs, decide these would be a lot of work and choose instead not to do the work, and so on for years. Nothing bad happens, just as nothing bad happened to the captain and sailors on the sailing ships stuck in the windless doldrums of the ocean. They drifted there happily until they died.  

We have learned the hard way that the same fate awaits organizations stuck in the Dangerous Doldrums. Their calls of reassurance about their situation stop. When we call to check on them, we find their phones disconnected and their websites have vanished. In all our years of coaching organization leaders, we have only managed to guide a few out of the Dangerous Doldrums. This syndrome is so comfortable, that even our suggestion of the first steps to counteract it often seem to be too much trouble.

If you think your organization is stuck in the Dangerous Doldrums, know that only a few simple steps are necessary to break free. Call or email us if you’d like our help. The first step is for you and your team to recognize the danger your organization is in. And just as sailors would have to muster the will to start rowing, you and your team must recommit to taking significant action towards increasing bicycling.  

The best way to muster this team commitment is to start by asking yourself why you originally stepped up to help lead your organization. What was that vision of change that lit a fire in your belly? Once you can feel that fire again, go to the other leaders and ask them the same. Then, with that passionate vision in front of all of you, pick up those oars and start rowing until you feel the wind of successful bicycle campaigns hit your sails once again.