At my first Mobile Bike Shop in August 2019! (Photo Credit: Graham Coreil-Allen)
I am writing with gratitude to share with our Bikemore community that this week is my last at Bikemore.
After I graduated in 2019, I was ready to jump into community organizing and nonprofit work in Baltimore, eager to contribute in the ways that I could and bring my energy to whatever opportunities came towards me. Through the Baltimore Corps fellowship, I found my first job at Bikemore. I started my role knowing nothing about transportation but a general knowledge of how much transportation contributed to the climate crisis.
Quickly, I learned that redesigning our roads to accommodate for cyclists, pedestrians, and transit users wasn’t just about mode shift to halt damaging practices to the environment - it was about righting the racist wrongs urban planners made decades ago, deliberately segregating communities. I see Complete Streets as a tool of transformative justice, a way to move our streets away from harmful and individualist transportation and towards a public space that brings people together.
I am so grateful for all of the people I’ve learned from through this job, from my cohort peers in CMTA’s Transportation 101, the inspirational parents who bike with their kids and show them a way to engage with the world around them, all of the partners that worked with me to pull off community events and programs, to each person I met at our Mobile Bike Shops.
I’m proud to say now that I feel comfortable getting around the city by bike and I think of Baltimore in a different, nuanced light than when I first graduated from Hopkins. And I’m greatly excited to support Bikemore as a Baltimore resident, cyclist, pedestrian, and transit rider. This Fall, I’ll start my master’s program in Social Work at the University of Maryland, and carry everything I’ve learned about community organizing, policy, Baltimore, and urbanism with me there.