Ending the year with a bang!
Hopefully your end-of-year holiday season was filled with light, warmth, peace, community, latkes and/or gingerbread houses!
As we slid into the holiday break, my December’s activism work shifted slightly from the usual one-on-one training sessions and instead focused on some broader projects. One of the most visible of which was my piece in Convergence Magazine, “Bike Lanes Vs. the Carceral State.”
For 15 years, Convergence Magazine has been a publication for political organizers working towards a multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic economy, so I am particularly excited to get the message to those leaders about the importance of tackling traffic violence. I believe that the traffic violence & social justice movements have a lot in common and can win bigger improvements to everyone’s lives if we deepen our collaboration. The piece is a bit “inside baseball” and I hope you enjoy that window into organizers talking about organizing!
Also in terms of getting the word out to a broader and new audience, in December I partnered with Intrinsic Path's Jonathon Stalls to plan our upcoming free public training “Politically Organize for Pedestrian Dignity.” Jonathan is a “Walking Artist” and for over a decade he has helped shine a light on the importance of walking/rolling in human connection, personal and planetary healing, racial and environmental justice, and much more. Our training isn’t for another few weeks and we already have over 75 people signed up for it!
The partnered training looks like it’ll be the largest single training I’ve hosted. I’m excited both to make it a great one and to partner with more thought leaders for future trainings! (I’m also glad I sprung for the paid Zoom account so I can technically handle the larger crowd).
Locally, I hosted five events in Oakland in December:
The three Meet & Greets with State Senate Candidates I mentioned planning in the November recap. Lots of good conversation about reforming the highway authority, shifting money towards transit & safe streets and lots of other fun topics! I wrote a how-to guide on Substack about them, they’re easier to organize than you might think.
A holiday lights bike ride with my city councilmember and about ~30 folks from the community.
An inter-faith, multi-racial, liberatory solidarity menorah lighting in Oakland with ~150 people including rabbis, Arab & Black community leaders, elected officials affirming that Oakland stands against antisemitism, Islamophobia, bigotry of any kind and is for the liberation of all people everywhere. I’ve only been an Oaklander for 12 years, but I think that event was one of the most Oakland things I’ve ever done (though the art show earlier this year is probably a close second).
With my Transbay Coalition hat (and a Santa hat) on, in December I helped with the Oak Center Cultural Center’s annual Christmas Toy giveaway event in West Oakland (the OCCC generously hosted us for the “Freedom to Ride: Transit and the Justice System” event in September). The main organizer told me how when she was a child, she was one of the kids in line for the toys and it was an honor to be able to help out with that Oakland tradition. As a Co-Director of the Transbay Coalition, I’m also in the process of forming our new Steering Committee of pro-transit activists around the nine-county Bay Area. 2024 is shaping up to be a BIG year for Bay Area transit advocacy. Stay tuned!
Though December was a big month for larger scale efforts, I still ended up training over 30 bike & street safety advocates in one-on-one and small group sessions. Advocates from Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California got help with planning their upcoming legislative pushes, learning how to translate the bike joy they create for their community to political power, and sharpening their organizational growth strategy.
After 10 months and having conducted over 360 trainings for transit/bike/street safety advocates, it’s becoming clearer that while there are a decent amount of individuals and groups able to pay for their own trainings, most have needed donors to cover their sessions. Most of these local and regional advocacy groups are entirely volunteer-run and operating on $0 or a shoestring budget. Local (and some state-level) organizations recognize the importance of strengthening their skills & strategies so they can win bigger. Lots of newly activated people are also interested in learning how to be more effective and win the changes they want to see – after all, this wasn’t covered in most people’s High School Civics class.
Thanks to my current donor base, I can host a free group training and also provide two free one-on-one trainings each month. With an additional $800 in monthly donations, I’d be able to double that. You can contribute directly here if you’re up for helping make that happen!
Lastly, the “Beyond the Ballot” Board Game is just about ready for its second print run for advanced playtesting. The game puts players in charge of a political campaign of their choosing where players hone strategy, deploy tactics and coordinate different types of political power to sway the decision maker. Besides being a lot of fun, the players develop experiential knowledge of campaigning and expanding their political imagination. One of my favorite aspects of the game is that people put almost any political struggle on it. At the board game convention where we debuted it, Big Bad Con, players used it to fight on all sorts of issues they dreamed up including:
Whether London Mayor Sadiq Khan should mandate outdoor bean bag chairs to be deployed throughout the city
A proposed chocolate ban in Washington State
A new Department of Energy policy requiring that all lightbulbs be hexagonally shaped
Should Vallejo mandate owl houses on every structure in the city?
My game developer partner and I just finished updating the 200+ unique cards for the game based on the first round of play testings and we’re about to put in the print order! Let me know if you’re interested in being one of the play testers. With print & shipping times, we’re looking at late January/early February. Should be a fun time.
Happy New Year,
Carter Lavin
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Still from my TikTok about the Convergence piece!
