One Street News

February 2010

Vol. 3, Issue 2

1. VISTA Application for Social Bike Business Program
2. Prescott College Bicycle Ambassadors
3. Resources Highlights – Street Painting for Safer Streets
4. Hot Topics – Innovation Diffusion

VISTA Application for Social Bike Business Program 

Are you on the hunt for a great job that will streamline your career path toward making the world a better place? One Street has teamed up with our local Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA) project to create this full-time, one year position. The lucky applicant who fits the job will spend a full year working with One Street to expand our Social Bike Business program. We’ve got a lovely office area set up in our historic office building right near downtown Prescott, Arizona. If you are interested, please take a look at our job description and apply today!

Prescott College Bicycle Ambassadors

By: Sue Knaup, Executive Director

We’re wrapping up the third week of the semester-long university bicycle course at Prescott College called “The Bicycle: Vehicle for a Small Planet.” I have to admit, I’m enjoying just as much inspiration from the course as my students. Each student is becoming a Prescott College Bicycle Ambassador by learning how to teach others to bicycle safely and fix their own bike. By learning how to teach others these important skills, these students can empower anyone to take up bicycling, no matter where they go in the world.  

On top of that tall order, they are learning the intricacies of making the case for bicycling to influential government officials as well as various public audiences. Besides getting all the lingo right and studying successful bicycle campaigns around the world, we’ve been studying the often bizarre tendencies of social groups when they are faced with the potential of change. Next week, we will put all of this into play when we sit down for our first of three meetings with local government officials to discuss bicycle improvements for Prescott, Arizona.

Over the next few weeks, each student will take what they are learning from these hands-on experiences to develop a bicycle campaign for their own hometown using One Street’s proven campaign planning process: www.onestreet.org/campaign-planning . Stay tuned for further updates as the Prescott College Bicycle Ambassadors take on more exciting projects for improving bicycling in communities around the world. 

Resources Highlights – Street Painting for Safer Streets

Sometimes, as bicycle advocates, it’s easy to get so frustrated with the long process for improving dangerous streets that we want to march right out and do something right away. This inspiring video offers a great model for doing just that. Grab some paint and a whole lot of kids and go nuts!  

Hot Topics – Innovation Diffusion

By: Sue Knaup, Executive Director

Have you ever tried to make a positive change, but ended up stunned by the lack of response to your innovative idea? 

Next week the students in my university bicycle course will welcome local community leaders to our classroom for an inspiring and unpredictable game that will demonstrate the dynamics of social change. Twenty volunteers from the audience will choose, at random, the roles they will play in the game as they are presented with the problem the students chose: The waste of food at local restaurants and supermarkets.

One participant will be an Innovator, others will be Change Agents and Transformers—all working to solve this problem. At the same time, the Reactionaries, Laggards and that annoying Curmudgeon will do everything they can to prevent the solution from taking hold. In the midst of this struggle will be the Mainstreamers, just trying to get on with their daily lives. But the Mainstreamers must be convinced to accept the change presented by the innovative solution if it is to succeed.  

This ingenious game always ends in success, even if the innovation fails. This is because the objective is for the participants to gain understanding of why even obvious changes that will serve whole communities, such as bicycling, can be so darn difficult to implement. To organize your own Innovation Diffusion Game, find all the instructions here: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC28/AtKisson.htm