Women Bike, Women Lead

The Women Bike, Women Lead series ended with a summit in April 2015. Two bike rides prior to the summit were designed to promote this summit and to generate a buzz and interest around it. It was inspired by the League of American Bicyclist’s National Bike Summit Women’s Bike Forum. We wanted to create an inviting and empowering summit that would give people an opportunity to engage with people in our near their communities, to boost interests in advocacy and to help us discover gaps in the work we do.

 

To achieve this, we created an intimate environment for fewer than 40 people to listen to and interact with panelists and presenters as well as with each other. Tasks for summit organizers include:

• Budgeting for the summit

• Defining the purpose of the event

• Creating a lineup of workshops and topics to cover

• Selecting the appropriate presenters and panelists

• Setting up registration and inviting participants

 

PURPOSE OF THE WORKSHOPS

Define the purpose and goal of the workshops. What are the intentions behind it? What benefits will people get out of participating? What information will you share? How can you create the most positive outcomes? Ask yourself questions to find what kind of workshop you want to create, what kind of discussions you want to have and what activities are a good fit.

For the summit that took place in April 2015, the goal was to connect women who are already interested in riding bicycles to the greater community, particularly groups within bicycle advocacy to exchange ideas and experiences as a way to tackle issues in Los Angeles.

 

SELECTING PANELISTS AND PRESENTERS

Panelists should be the most dynamic, influential, and knowledgeable people for the topics being discussed. At the Los Angeles summit in April 2015, the three panel discussions focused on health and social equity, planning and policy and market and media, and organizers sought people who would contribute their unique perspectives to drive a thoughtful and engaging discussion.

People being approached to speak on a panel or to give a presentation may not even consider themselves experts but are certainly capable of giving an informative and empowering talk. During planning conversations, provide an overview, ask them what their they would like to cover, give them time to accept or decline the opportunity. Make it clear when they should do so. Solicit feedback and convene the panelists beforehand to plan out the direction of the talk and to avoid overlapping information. Collect their short biographies, photos, and other material needed to promote the event.

 

REGISTRATION

Based on the goals for the summit, the budget, decision to charge admission/registration feels, and the capacity of the venue, determine the amount of participants the event can accomodate.

 

Use a registration or ticketing system to help organize this procress. Due to limited capacity, we prioritized participants who have been engaged with the bike rides or expressed interest early on, regardless of attending the previous events.

 

Eventbrite was used to send invitations to register and was also used to collect donations with the opportunity to be entered into a raffle for prizes.

 

The registration process is a good time to collect data about participants to guide the planning process and to inform decisions. We asked participants about their interests, location, and preferred gender pronoun.

 

Participants were given the following options for interests related to cycling:

• health

• transportation

• social and recreational

• racing and competition

• mechanics/repair/trade

• safety and education

• retail/business

• fashion

• marketing

• policy and advocacy