 That's about Genie growing the work that we're all committed to. Thanks. What a great way to begin the California Bicycle Summit. Next I want to introduce Tony Dang, who is the Executive Director of California Walks. Good morning everyone. So Dave asked me to talk about and share some of my reflections as a board member and the sort of strategic planning process that we've gone over the past two years. And I think some of you might be asking, you know, why me? Why this walk advocate, right? Because I think historically walking advocates and biking advocates haven't really gotten along very much. You know, we're kind of in this like frenemies relationship. But I think it's precisely because of that historical context that Dave has asked me to share my reflections. Because as a board member, I'm probably the most critical of the organization. So here I am to share some of my reflections. So it's been two years since our last summit, the last time I was in San Diego. And I think for those of you who are there, you might remember that I shared pretty frankly that I felt that CalBike was not ready as an organization to tackle issues of equity and social justice. Point blank. We were not prepared to have that conversation. And so what I can say is that after that summit, I did a lot of reflection. I never shared this with Dave, but I actually had a crisis of confidence in the organization. I thought really long and hard about whether I even wanted to stay involved, right? But to Dave's credit, he has worked very hard to ensure that CalBike as an organization is really meaningfully trying to tackle this issue of equity and reorienting our organization to be a much better partner and ally to the other organizations in our state doing the hard work on the ground. So I want to share over the past two years, like Dave mentioned, we've had a lot of really tough conversations. And in your guys' packet, which Esteban will be talking about, we've crafted what I still consider to be kind of a draft of our new vision goals and strategic direction for the organization. It's definitely not perfect. I will readily admit that I as an individual and CalBike as an organization are still learning. And I want to open it up to all of you to really give us feedback to really strengthen this, right? Because it's absolutely meaningless to put something on paper if we're not willing to change and adapt to actually meet the needs of the people we're trying to serve. One thing that I really hammered home a few years ago at the last summit was the need for CalBike to really cultivate and sustain new leaders in the field and in this movement. And I think that CalBike has done a really great job doing that over the past two years. As a board member, I've seen that reflected in our board itself. I want to give a shout out to Esteban, to Chanel, to HenoVeva, our new board members who have really, I think, reinvigorated our board discussions and have really brought this critical perspective to the organization to shape our new direction. I'm also really happy to say that Dave was super supportive and willing to work with my organization, California Walks, to launch the Walk and Bike Youth Leaders Program. So there's a table of kids aged, I think we have 16, 30, 23 over there, and all over the state. We've been working with them over the summer to teach them the ins and outs of advocacy, of walking and biking design. We've taught them how to do walk bike audits. And Dave actually came up with some really great personal reflections through photo voice and video voice projects, which you'll see a little bit of tomorrow. But if you want the full peak at all of our youth leaders, there's going to be a session here in this room at 11, so I really encourage you to come by and check them out. So turning away from Cal Bike as an organization, I do want to pick up on a couple of things that Kate talked about. So as you may know, the state passed a huge transportation funding package and while I agree that it's a huge opportunity, it's not foregone that it will benefit all Californians equally. So while I do want to see Cal Trans become the Department of Access, I think it's really important for us advocates in the room to work to ensure that Cal Trans becomes the Department of Access and Opportunity. We as advocates need to push for these flexible state dollars to not just build communities through transportation, but to strengthen our existing communities to lift up their needs with these new dollars. And I think with that I will hand it over to Stepan. Thank you. Thanks Tony. I saw Cynthia Rose, another board member come in say, Cynthia. I also see some veteranos of the untokening that happened in Atlanta. If anyone did, the untokening raise your hand. So there's a few folks, I was there, a national meeting to create just and equitable communities where there's going to be an untokening California in the beginning of November. Oh hey Jim, there you are. I can see you back. Any other board members sneaking? Chanel's here. Say hey Chanel. Wonderful. Okay, great. Okay, I'm going to try to be brief because I could go on and on. I'm a professor in my day job and I just talk forever so I'm going to try my best to keep this to about 10 minutes. I want to talk about our strategic plan and carry on. I think the way that Tony introduced it, which is absolutely accurate, that it is broadly a process, right? And it needs to be activated by Calibike, but all of us in California working together to advance the ideas that it's suggesting and ultimately promoting. I want to say that from a board perspective, I think we took on the deliberative task of strategic planning seriously. I think that there's a lot of excitement about our direction. In terms of process, there are 80 stakeholders from different organizations, different folks all around the state, some even outside the state, who we spoke with. There were 13 focus groups and 47 participants in those focus groups. So this plan is a process of engagement. It's also a process of discernment, which the board has done, the staff has done together. And we're asking for ongoing engagement and discernment. And it's a plan of action. Who are my teachers in the room? Any teachers, school teachers? Okay, right on. Let's do a little thing, a little exercise I've done with my students before. So if you could take out this sheet, which has our strategic plan on it. Okay, hopefully you can hear me. I'm going to read our new mission aloud. You can read silently to yourself. So, our new strategic plan. CalBikes mission is to advocate for equitable, inclusive and prosperous communities where bicycling helps to enable all Californians to lead healthy and joyful lives. Some of the teachers or experts in here, what we want to do is we want to ask you to embody our vision by speaking it. Okay, so what I'm going to do, it's not quite a call and response. What I'm going to do is I'm going to say we envision a California before each paragraph, even though it's only written in the person. So I'm going to say we envision a California and then all together we're going to read the vision. Okay, so we're going to embody it. We're going to use our bodies, the same bodies that move through space to enunciate our vision. Okay, so, are you with me? All right, all right. It's not Christ, but Tori. I'm with you. We envision a California where our public spaces, especially our streets, our state, our healing, and accessible for the Californians to have their own economic status, the grace, the gender, and the relationship status for our ability. We envision a California where our communities are prosperous, with a rural, urban, and conservative, and all kind of communities enjoy a high quality of life, and free from poverty, and violence, and oppression. We envision a California where our communities have access to affordable housing, a city of connection, affordable by life, the places we learn, work, play, and access to health care, inconvenient and affordable public transit, and in abundant free spaces, cool our streets, and provided with space. We envision a California where decisions about transportation, our state, our community, and whether or not those are intact, and whether we're in a factor-specific system, and where we're loathing communities and communities of color, no longer bearing the greatest burdens of the environmental, public life, and safety, and access to transportation. And we envision a California that provides communities love and appreciate it by everyone who works for us, for the community, for the community, for the college, for the city, and for the joy that all of our communities benefit from, and our streets are full of hospitals. Okay, that's our vision. I already suggested in the ongoing process, so I'm going to say, and I'm going to court-test what James is thinking about next when we talk about our goals, okay? I'm just going to be very brief about this, because I think on the board, we think that this is what an equity agenda looks like, okay? If you look at our mission and vision and goals. Of course, that's ongoing. What does it look like tomorrow? What does it need to look like? What needs to be strengthened? But I want to say three things about equity agenda, okay? So first, equity is a process. Not a place to go. It's not a utopia. It's a struggle that must be taken up. It's a path that must be gone down. And it's not going to be some kind of, you know, a wonderful gauge that we walked through if we had the exact right language, right? Or the exact right things. It must be taken up. And it can't just be cow-bibed, or certain of us, it's got to be everyone. To take up the word is a process. Second, equity is transformational. I realize that's kind of a neoliberal word. It's a word that's been used a lot, but it really matters here, right? One of the things we'll notice in our strategic plan is that we don't have a special equity piece of it, right? What we try to do is leave equity all the way through it, okay? Equity can't just be added on to existing work, right? As though it's a new appendage, okay? It has to change the work from the sensor of the work. Everything, it has to undergo a process of reflection and discernment and recommitment, and then re-engage that process. Equity work just can't be added on. The additive equity work tokenizes people. It tokenizes projects. This is about changing who we are and what we do to be more responsive and responsible to the truth and the lived experience of our community. So equity is a process. Equity is transformative. And equity must be held. Think about this thing. It's a struggle that has to be engaged and it's transformational. It asks us all to change our work. It's not always easy to hold it, right? So it must work caring, okay? Others haven't really gotten in touch yet, right? Because sometimes it's got a lot of spikes around it or a lot of prickly things, you know? Sometimes it really does kind of cut us where it hurts or access to change things. We don't really want to change because it works for us and it has to be held, right? It can't be just looked at passively. It has to be taken up and sometimes it's hard to hold it, but it has to be held. So over to Dave Snyder who's going to talk about our goals. Thank you. Great, so I don't want to take too much time. I'm really proud of our new strategic plan and very optimistic about where we're going to go in the next five years and what we're going to get done. Because I look back at our last strategic plan that we did in 2012. We invited the leaders of the existing bicycle advocacy organizations to Sacramento. We spent a day working through our priorities and coming up with a set of goals and we nailed it. We nearly doubled. If you count some other bits of money I think you can say we doubled the active transportation program in the course of those five years. That was our goal we did. It is in fact the largest such program in the United States. But it is nowhere near the largest per capita I might add. The state of Washington, Colorado, Delaware all exceed, to name a few, all exceed California in terms of the amount of money they dedicate to biking and walking from their state budgets. So we are setting as one of our goals in our next strategic plan to increase more the active transportation program to 500 million a year. That's our goal. We're going to do it because we did it last time. The other, one of our other big priorities in our last strategic plan was to get protected bike lanes approved. We did it. And another was to get the three foot first safety act passed and we did that. Our next strategic plan is, as Esteban said very much rooted in this priority of equity. And I want to speak to that for a minute, go through our strategic goals real quickly and then get us on to the rest of the summit. The equity is different than equality as you know but I think it's close to that. And one of the key reasons, one of the foundational principles of our shift toward equity is to address what I think most of us and most Americans might accept is the single biggest problem facing us as a society which is income inequality, the vast incredible disparate differences and the difficulty that people without resources have in making it and how the rich get richer, nevertheless. And in the United States in a nation founded on slavery in order to create the income for the rich and which has never dealt with that cannot talk about income inequality without talking about racial inequality and racism. And so all of our work and every single goal is going to be conscious of the importance of equity in terms of income and race to name two of many areas of the equality. That's why our first goal is to prioritize low income communities and communities of color and transportation spending. We're going to win that one. Our second goal is to improve the built environment for biking, walking and transit. We're going to increase the ATP to $500 million, like I said. Our priority is to win a complete streets policy. I'm just going to highlight the ones particularly that Kate mentioned in her speech. We talked about complete streets and we all know that we have a long way to go to win a complete streets policy at Caltrans that's truly effective. It's one thing to say, yeah, we thought about putting it in by claim, but nah, it's not going to work. Check. It's another to really do it, to really think hard and do it and not do it only if you have a really good reason. It's true, not on every street, but we need our city officials in Caltrans to take that seriously. We have a bill that we're introducing next year that will force Caltrans to take their complete streets policy much, much more seriously. The other part of the goal number two on there is about changing design practices and we are very proud of the work that Caltrans has done so far in helping people understand how you build what is officially called a separated bikeway and how you can do all kinds of better and improved designs. But that material in the highway design manual and in the California manual and uniform traffic control devices is all kind of scattered and it's not as accessible as it needs to be. And so we want Caltrans to develop the national leading guide on street design for biking and walking. Our third goal is to change our transportation policies. This is not an infrastructure goal, but a policy goal things like automated speed enforcement things like getting community bike shops and communities throughout the state where the economy won't support regular bike shops but where people still need to get their bikes worked on and be able to buy affordable bikes. We should be able to have community bike shops everywhere where people can walk to them. And then just like last year just like in our last strategic plan we recognized that this is a process like Esteban said and that our success is going to depend on the strength of all of you in your communities with your elected officials with your policy makers with your neighbors with the people who care about your communities you need to be strong and we're going to do what we can and listen to you and do what you would like us to do to help strengthen your movement. We have a number of goals to specifically work to strengthen local organizations. One of them that I can share is to get a license plate a bicycle rental license plate passed which over the course of five to ten years could raise a million dollars for local community education outreach advocacy. I got to give a shout out to David Bodick who's not here at the Department of Public Health who's working with us on that. So those are goals. If you redo them you might compare them to the summit program and see that there's a heck of a lot of summit program items that cover various aspects of these goals. I encourage you to attend as much of this as you can. It's going to be fantastic. The people in this room are great and the conversations are going to be great. That's why our theme is connecting people, places and issues. I think we've been pretty clear about how we're connecting the issues. We're going beyond bicycling. United around what the bicycle can do for our communities. We're obviously connecting places. There are a number of workshops about how you design the streets to connect the places to wherever you go and we're connecting people. With that I want to acknowledge a person and some people who aren't here right now. Brian Velaz of Bike San Gabriel Valley passed away last week and most of his co-workers are not here. He was the outreach coordinator and a beloved staff person and he and they are missed and I'm going to ask for just a moment of silence to acknowledge that. As we connect among each other at this summit we should be aware of a few changes in their programs. Let me jump into logistics before I thank folks. The event Women of Color Talk about transportation is canceled because it was organized by the folks from Bike SGV who can't be here. So that event is canceled but you are encouraged to attend the Advocacy Open Space Conference Thursday afternoon where you can propose that topic and have some time to have a conversation among women of color in transportation or about women of color in transportation during that period. That's a highlight that I want to point out along with a couple of other unusual things that we're doing at this summit that I'm very, very excited about. The Advocacy Open Space Conference is sometimes called an unconference. We call it open space because I think that's a better title. It is actually a conference so why call it an unconference and an unusual event. We've set aside five rooms and three time slots on Thursday afternoon for us to address issues like how do we have a membership program in our organization? What's the best way to talk to the media? Whatever will strengthen us as a movement in terms of the advocacy is on the agenda, the first session that we'll see in the program is facilitated by an expert in open space conferences. We encourage you to go to that and propose what you want to talk about or what you want to learn and the facilitator will assign that topic as voted on by the group right there will assign that topic to a session. I'm really excited about that event. The Bikeway Design Symposium tomorrow afternoon is another unusual event maybe invented here. It's also over three sessions.