One Street News

August 2011

Vol. 4, Issue 7

1. One Street to Uganda
2. One Street to Interbike
3. Resources – Flattering Bike Movie Clips
4. Hot Topics – Avoiding Harmful Transitions

One Street to Uganda

By: Sue Knaup, Executive Director 

Regular readers of our e-newsletter will remember my reports about my first trip to Uganda in January this year to work directly with the leaders of Ride 4 a Woman (R4W) as part of our Social Bike Business program. Since that trip, I’ve been working with R4W’s leaders through email, which just doesn’t cut it for their next level organization development and bicycle mechanic training needs.

So, we’re planning my next trip to Uganda in January 2012 and they’ve already got a big lineup for me while I’m there:

• bringing more professional bicycle tools and offering high-level professional bicycle repair training to R4W staff and members;
• training R4W staff on pricing, inventory control, and customer service;
• offering R4W staff train-the-trainer workshops on teaching bike riding and repair and helping them offer these classes to their women members;
• training R4W leaders on next level strategic planning for management, budgeting, increased revenue, and program development for their women’s programs;
• purchasing used mountain bike (they need my trained eye to pick out good quality bikes);
• helping them set-up their micro-lending program to provide transportation bikes to their women members; 
• helping coordinate collaborative partner meetings;
• helping R4W expand their mountain bike rental program including mapping of a new mountain bike trail and set up of a volunteer trail building system with tourists.

If you’d like to help ensure this next trip is an outstanding success, the best way at this time is to donate through our IndieGoGo page at: www.indiegogo.com/OneStreet  

IndieGoGo uses a ranking system to determine which fundraising campaigns show up first for funders visiting their site. The more donors a campaign has, the more likely it will show up and catch the eye of new funders. So, even if you can only donate a small amount at this time, your donation will help us attract more funders. Thank you in advance!

To read more about the trip and Ride 4 a Woman, please visit our One Street to Uganda web page. 

One Street to Interbike

Even as we work on raising funds for my next trip to Uganda, we are also planning a trip much closer to home – the Interbike Trade Show in Las Vegas in mid-September. Each year, One Street has a booth at the show and we’re once again looking forward to showing off our wears. Temmy Bowler (our new VISTA member), Johanna Hawley (a One Street Advisor) and I will share the tasks of greeting folks at the booth and connecting with our partners at the show.  

This year, will be especially exciting as we will have the opportunity to connect with partners regarding our new One Street Components program. We launched this program to provide basic bike parts that serve the needs of impoverished people as such parts vanish around the world.

If you are planning to be at Interbike and would like to connect with us, please email me at: sue{at}onestreet.org. 

Resources – Flattering Bike Movie Clips

Are you tired of seeing bicycles used in movies to portray actors as dorks and idiots? So are we! That’s why we were so thrilled to discover this montage of bicycle movie clips, most of which portray bicyclists and bicycling in a positive light. Enjoy! 

Hot Topics – Avoiding Harmful Transitions

Have you had the pleasure of celebrating the departure of a great staff member followed by the welcoming of their replacement without missing a beat in your organization’s plans? Unfortunately, through our on-call coaching work with leaders of local bicycle organizations around the world, we’ve found that such transitions are terribly rare. 

Sometimes a valued staff member suddenly gives their notice they are leaving. This can be devastating to the executive director and board of a strong organization because they saw this person playing a key role in their long term vision for the organization. Perhaps they’d even expected this person to become the next executive director. Instead, a deep, painful hole appears and the organization loses its momentum.

Transitions of ineffective staff or board members are often the hardest for us to coach leaders through. A person given a role that does not fit their abilities can often become hostile toward the organization and its leaders. When these leaders call us, they are usually stuck in the nightmare of getting rid of such a person even as this person slanders the organization to valuable partners and the media. Such cases take on an emergency pace as we guide the leaders through minute by minute. And when this person has finally left the organization, the leaders are so spent by the battle, the organization loses its momentum. 

While these scenarios are vastly different, they share a similar result. The easiest way to deal with transitions is to pretend they won’t happen. But this is exactly the attitude that leads to the above scenarios. Instead, if you want to avoid these all too common situations, you and your fellow leaders have to put in some hard work now, while everything is going smoothly.

You might place names next to priority tasks in your work plan, but having these tasks and how to accomplish them clearly written out allows the easy exchange of names. The clarity of a good work plan and budget will help you and your fellow leaders look past the disruption of a transition to the clear steps needed to stay on track. If you have not yet created an annual work plan/budget system for your organization, please email or call Sue Knaup, our executive director, right away so she can guide you through the process: sue{at}onestreet.org or 928-541-9841. 

Once you have your work plan/budget in place, here are a few more documents and policies that you can adapt to your organization to further assist in avoiding harmful transitions:

• Employee agreement – to clarify the employee’s role and ensure a good fit.
• Employee handbook – make sure each new staff member signs and returns the last page.
• Letter of commitment – demonstrates to board and committee members the high level of responsibility and commitment they have taken on for the organization. 

But none of the above documents and policies can replace the clarity of a strong work plan/budget and the comfort it will offer to you and your fellow leaders the next time you are faced with a transition.