Advocacy Update
Amy Brugh, the Interim Executive Director for Our Streets, led a conversation about the history of Our Streets’ advocacy.
Currently there are two active workgroups:
- our Downtown Bikeways workgroup, and
- the Pedestrian Advocacy workgroup.
The main advocacy campaigns that Our Streets has underway now are:
- supporting the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan’s biking, walking and rolling priorities,
- engaging with the Transportation Action Plan process (formerly known as Access Minneapolis), and
- Pedestrian and Rolling initiatives - especially around winter sidewalks.
Our Streets has gone through phases of how we approach advocacy, and today the leadership of Our Streets would like to get back to being more grassroots and a little bit less wonky. Amy reminded us to celebrate our progress in our workgroup!
Workgroup Updates
After Amy’s discussion, the 9th and 10th street workgroup reported that they have had some good success getting businesses to sign on to their letter of support, and that they are going to continue to be persistent in order to get even more businesses on board before December.
The LaSalle-Blaisdell and 1st workgroup reported that they had made contact with the four schools along the corridor, and were working on getting them to show support for protected bikeways in the corridor. In addition, the workgroup reported that they had completed one interview with a pedestrian that uses the corridor frequently. The workgroup committed to getting as many more interviews completed as possible before December.
An Invitation
If you'd like to be involved, we'd love to have you join us! Next month we hope the Our Streets Volunteer Coordinator will come. To join us, you can get in touch with Our Streets for more information, or just come to our next meeting! It’s on Monday, December 3rd at the Dunn Brothers at 329 W 15th Street. (Please show up at 5:45 for a quick pre-meeting orientation chat if you’re new.)
If you’d like to learn more about what we have been up to this year, here’s a look back at our other monthly updates: October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March.
