Ride home for Thursday, 13 December
Went down to IdealBikes after work, then on to the Halifax Cycle Coalition meeting. There was a pretty good turnout of around 50-60 people. The most surprising attendee for me was the motorist who turned up, saying (paraphrasing from memory) "I see what you guys have to put up with every day on Quinpool and I just don't think it's right that you have to go through that" - interesting that people do actually notice what's going on!
Doug gave an intro at the start of the meeting and then we went through the bylaws, which took an awfully long time but was finally completed. After that was voting on directorships. As I'd already been pushed forward as a nominee I at least got the chance to pick what I was a candidate for, and went for Membership Director. There were two other candidates contesting against me, one of whom started his candidacy speech with "I realise I'm not going to win against Steve, but I thought it was important that it was at least a proper contest" - at least democracy was given a chance, so kudos to Adrian and Andrew! As Andrew predicted I won the vote, and I did at least manage to get Doug on the board despite his protestations that he didn't want to be an executive director; he's on as "Member at Large", a special non-executive position I put forward to be created in his honour for all the hard work he did getting it started. Now that HCC is officially started as a non-profit, it's time to start doing some hard work drumming up membership and getting things moving, so if any of my readers have experience of cycling non-profits in their area I'd be interested to hear of their expertise.
Rode home after the meeting with the new co-chair Andrew (I think that was him under all the winter clothes) and Peter. It was a snowy and icy ride home, but taking the back streets we were able to take it easy and ride together, which made a pleasant change from my usual solo ride.
Distance logged: 16.808km
Time: 70:37
Average speed: 14.3km/hr
Max speed: 33.6 km/hr
Temperature: -10C to -12C, snowing
Cumulative distance: 4803.397km
Cumulative cost per km: $0.2
Monthly distance: 337.919km
Monthly cost per km: $0.13
Doug gave an intro at the start of the meeting and then we went through the bylaws, which took an awfully long time but was finally completed. After that was voting on directorships. As I'd already been pushed forward as a nominee I at least got the chance to pick what I was a candidate for, and went for Membership Director. There were two other candidates contesting against me, one of whom started his candidacy speech with "I realise I'm not going to win against Steve, but I thought it was important that it was at least a proper contest" - at least democracy was given a chance, so kudos to Adrian and Andrew! As Andrew predicted I won the vote, and I did at least manage to get Doug on the board despite his protestations that he didn't want to be an executive director; he's on as "Member at Large", a special non-executive position I put forward to be created in his honour for all the hard work he did getting it started. Now that HCC is officially started as a non-profit, it's time to start doing some hard work drumming up membership and getting things moving, so if any of my readers have experience of cycling non-profits in their area I'd be interested to hear of their expertise.
Rode home after the meeting with the new co-chair Andrew (I think that was him under all the winter clothes) and Peter. It was a snowy and icy ride home, but taking the back streets we were able to take it easy and ride together, which made a pleasant change from my usual solo ride.
Distance logged: 16.808km
Time: 70:37
Average speed: 14.3km/hr
Max speed: 33.6 km/hr
Temperature: -10C to -12C, snowing
Cumulative distance: 4803.397km
Cumulative cost per km: $0.2
Monthly distance: 337.919km
Monthly cost per km: $0.13
posted by steve at 12/16/2007 12:41:00 pm
1 Comments:
A couple tips from someone who has helped rescue a collapsing cycling advocacy group:
- Never lose sight of your main goal: to get more people cycling and to get cycling to be safer.
- Don't be afraid to turn down opportunities if you don't have the resources to follow through on them, or if they don't tie directly to your main goal.
- Similarly, if someone suggests "we should do X", and nobody is willing to organize it, put it aside and focus instead on something that does have interest.
- Recognize volunteers on a regular basis. If you run out of volunteers to recognize, then that's a sign you need to recruit more. Don't let your core group burn out.
- Recruit members! It's very easy, just have info booths at cycling-related events, or even along cycling routes, hold your own events, and get your name out.
Cheers,
Charles Akben-Marchand
President
Citizens for Safe Cycling
President@SafeCycling.ca
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