Community Bike Education and Meal Delivery Activism

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Xander Lee used community organizing, outreach, and popular education skills they gained during their fellowship with Strategic Actions for a Just Economy to promote sustainable mobility approaches such as biking and using mass transit. Xander conducted community workshops on bicycle maintenance and safe riding, turned community members out to open-streets events such as CiclaVia and the Marathon Crash Ride, and lead a group ride of volunteers delivering hot meals to unhoused community members in Koreatown via bike in association with Bicyclemeals, a community-based organization.

2. IMPORTANCE:
Alternative mobility uptake/modal shift is critically important for staying under 2 degrees centigrade warming. Providing popular education on how to maintain bicycles cheaply and safely ride empowers people to use the rusty bikes languishing in their garages without exorbitant cost or with at least mitigated cost. In addition, turning community members out to open streets events by taking public transit to ciclavia hubs and the start of the marathon crash ride gives them a vision of a car-free world and is a common experience of activism-as-joy.

3. IMPACT AND REACH:
I am holding my bike maintenance workshop this coming Friday with an RSVP list of 10 people so far. 11 people participated in my organized group ride to bicyclemeals, where we delivered over 100 hot meals. 15 people each participated in the open streets events, Ciclavia and the Marathon Crash Ride. My project organized UCLA students for popular education and members of the community in south LA, palms, mar vista, eagle rock, and downtown joined the food delivery with bicyclemeals. Our outreached population was primarily unhoused members of the community in Koreatown.

4. COLLABORATIONS:

I utilized my existing connections with colleagues, friends, and local community spaces to recruit participants to an Instagram groupchat moderated by myself. I offer limited free bike repair services and lend out bikes to people who need to borrow to participate to allow a variety of people to participate.

5. YOUR ROLE WELL DEFINED:
In addition to designing a workshop curriculum covering basic bicycle maintenance and safety tips, I turned out community members, colleagues, and friends to participate in open streets events and food delivery donations through aggressively marketing activities amongst social networks.

6. OPTIONAL NEXT STEPS

I plan to continue organizing this group of cyclists interested in sustainability and community activism to hopefully begin advocating for policy and assisting in the implementation of measure HLA